We don’t get what we deserve, we get what we put up with.
How did we get here?
Then
What is Truth? Pilate
Well, there are two kinds of truth. The one you feel with your shin when you hit a coffee table. And the one you feel in your heart when those present laugh at you hopping on one leg while caressing the hurt one.
Which two kinds of truth divide us, people, into two categories. Those trying to patch ‘an ever-changing truth’ out of many individual pictures – each of them the consequence of a ‘shin’ happening to connect with a portion of the ‘outside world’. Which people are currently known as ‘scientists’. And those trying to reach ‘the truth’. By thinking, by divination, by… God only knows what any other means… Philosophers, theologians, quacks…
I was trained as an engineer. To notice needs and to design solutions while evaluating the possible consequences of those needs being met by the proposed solutions. Which places me squarely into the first category.
‘We killed God and we now have to face the consequences’. That’s what Nietzsche told us. And then died. Like everybody else. Is this consistent with the notion of an all-powerfull and omni-scient God? As suggested by the second image?
The only God we know is the one we talk about. Among ourselves. During the ‘Middle Ages’ some of our ancestors killed each-other over their particular interpretations of the Bible. But they all agreed about one thing. For them, there was only one God. And they killed a lot of unbelievers attempting to convince them. At some point, and Nietzsche witnessed that, people had stopped believing there was only one God. God was no longer seen as an unifying principle and had become a mere representation.
I don’t know whether there is a god. A ‘real’ one. But is has become obvious that the one we talk about has stopped playing its role. It no longer unites us. We’re no longer children of the same father.
We have splintered ourselves into clans. Each wielding their own representation of God. Each wielding their own ‘hand made’ idol.
The world is nothing but change. Our life is nothing but perception. Marcus Aurelius.
Killing is the most definitive thing available to man. To humans in general and to men in particular.
We cannot create life! We can make love, our wives can give birth but other than that…
Yet we can kill!
You see, most animals feed on other living organisms. We describe the process as ‘the law of the jungle’ but for them it’s only natural. That’s how they feed. That’s how they get their sustenance. None of them gives much thought about it. When hungry, they do what they have to do. And then they stop.
We are the ones who get to choose. To kill or not to kill… We are the ones who, once aware, have introduced thinking into all these. We are the ones who, through our awareness, have transformed sensation into perception. We are the ones who, in our attempt to create/maintain congruence – to keep things together, have attached meaning to sensation.
We are the ones who, once we have learned the difference between good and bad, have invented the notion of evil.
We are the ones who, once we have learned the difference between good and bad, have tried to separate them. To separate what we have perceived as good from what we have perceived as bad. And called it evil…
And now, that we’ve reached the stage where we currently are, we’ve set our minds to determine which had come first. The egg or the chicken… The Good or the Bad?!? Matter or Spirit?
When we’ll grow up, when we will have caught up with Marcus Aurelius, we’ll remember that there’s no clapping with one hand. That while it may be natural to feed on other animals, there’s no escaping the consequences of our killings.
The process through which individual agents transmit and receive information.
The space inside which the above mentioned individuals do what ever they set their minds to do. The stage used by each of us, according to our own goals and abilities, to perform our self assigned roles. Inside and/or outside the roles bestowed upon us by ‘fate’.
Consequences? The shapes and content of our individual consciences. Consciousnesses. Culture, as the historically accrued trove of knowledge more or less accessible – through language and subjected to interpretation – to each of us. Civilization, as the result of our cooperative effort to ‘make good’ the knowledge we have inherited and/or gleaned ourselves.
Language is the tool we use to convey information. To speak our minds…
The consequences of tool use – messages, in this case – depend on the yielder. The consequences of shooting a gun depend mainly on the person aiming the gun. The consequences of using language … depend on those who are at the both ends of the ‘barrel’.
Messages – consequences of language being used to put together batches of information with the intent of transmitting them to an audience – are interpreted as soon as they reach their ‘target’. Meaning – what the receptor makes of a message, using the same languaging tools as those put to work by the emitter – depends mainly on the receptor. In fact, most of the times, there’s more information to be gleaned from a message than that intended to be conveyed by the person initiating the exchange.
If interested in who said what and what Orwell thought about the subject… just click on the link above. I’ll only add the reasons for which I know it to be a misleading affirmation.
The factual truth is that only dictators need to be guarded by rough men during their sleep. And during the rest of their lives… We, the rest of ‘the people’, go to sleep at night knowing there’s only a very slim chance to be targeted by thieves. Yes, we know that the police will likely come to investigate after the fact. After the fact… But we also know that we are less likely to fall prey to violence than those living in other countries because our societies work better than those which are more violent than ours.
Because our society works better, not because we employ more ‘rough men’ to guard us… On the contrary! The more violent a country, the more ‘popular’ the ‘rough men’ are. On both ‘sides of the isle’!
And the more violent a country, the less peacefully people sleep in that country…
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, toknow good and evil. Gen 3:22
Why are we doing all this?
?!?
You heard me. ‘Why are we doing all this?’ Everything that we do.
Is anything wrong with you?
No. Not anything that I know of. Only this question which has arisen on it own. Why don’t we just stop? Stop doing everything that we do…
But doing what we do is the reason for our existence… Otherwise we would not exist. At all! The world itself would have been different. Completely different!
So what?!? Do you really care about the world? What’s in it for you? For us… What benefit do we have from the world being as it is? Or at all…
How many times have you been hit by something you didn’t see coming?
Not very often… for the simple reason that these encounters use to end up badly! Bent fenders, broken bones… Hence we pay attention. Or get killed… end of story!
But how many times have you experienced bad consequences, really bad consequences, after misjudging a situation? After a ‘doesn’t matter’ uttered nonchalantly?
“Denn selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen” Hence the free must define their own nature Richard Wagner, Die Walkuere
In my previous post, I related to ‘life’ as a living creature. I described life from the inside. The perception of a living organism. But what if ‘life’, as a phenomenon, is how meaning is created by the environment where the process takes place?
For an outside observer, there are three stages. Pre-biotic, self-driven and meaning-driven life.
Life, as we know it, cannot exist on the surface of the Sun. Or on the surface of any other star. But neither can life exist without the processes taking place inside the stars. Without the energy being radiated by the stars and without the atoms being ‘cooked’ inside them and spewed out during the last stages of their ‘lives’.
Having said that, the rest is simple. Where ever conditions are ‘right’, atoms get together in such a manner that ‘structures’ become ‘alive’. Those structures become organisms and display the characteristics we’ve come to associate with life. In this stage, the only ‘force’ which drives the process is what we call ‘evolution’. Species cease to exist as they are no longer able to weather changes in their environment and new species arise along with the advent of new opportunities. And, at this stage, a second ‘disturbing agent’ starts to influence the environment. Living organisms, in order to live, need to ingest portions of where they live. To excrete the by-products of their metabolism. And they leave behind ’empty carcasses’ at the moment of their death. For example, the oxygen we breathe in is the by product offered to us by the plants which live at our side. And the fertile soil those plants ‘eat’ in order to provide us – the oxygen breathing organisms – with what we need to survive, is the consequence of previously living creatures.
In the third stage, that where ‘meaning’ becomes a force to be reckoned with, the changes perpetrated to the environment cease to remain ‘natural’. As they used to be during the second, self-driven, stage. In the third stage, an increasing number of changes to the environment are driven by purpose. Are purposefully staged by agents acting according to the meaning they have found.
Mother Earth being the source of life – the, not “a” – is a truism. Regardless. On the other hand, being a mere resource isn’t bad either… For the simple reason that all reasonable people treat resources is a responsible manner.
Right? Specially when speaking about resources which are ireplaceable! And since there is only one Earth… Huge, indeed, but finite nevertheless…
Which brings us back to ‘to each their own’.
Basically, there are two kinds of people currently living on Earth. Some continue to treat it as a Mother – take from her only what they need and refrain from littering her bossom. And the ‘cherry-pickers’. Who go by “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Who believe they had been given a free hand by their God. A free hand regarding the ‘dirt’ they have been made from… The only problem with the ‘cherry pickers’ – exclusivelly with the ‘cherry pickers’ – being the fact that they don’t read enough. Enough of their (own) Book.
‘Don’t eat any animal which has not been bled out first and don’t spill human blood?’ I’m afraid you’re still not getting it.
According to the book we’re talking about, God has made the entire world. Sparated the stars from the Earth, the water from the dry land, made all the plants and the animals… and Man. Which man needs the Earth to live upon. An Earth as close to how it currently is as possible, in order for man to live comfortably! But since “in the image of God has God made mankind”, then God himself needs the Earth. For whatever reason.
Which means we’d better take good care of His Creation. Of His entire Creation!
‘OK, no more floods. But you’re still going to feel the consequences of your own follies. You, your children and all those wallowing in the wicked way’.
Destination first. If you know where you’re going, getting there will be a lot simpler.
According to Daniel Moynihan – “you are not entitled to your own facts”, facts are obvious. So obvious that doubting their existence, their factuality, would push us beyond the realm of the reasonable. Appropriating facts – transforming them into ‘private property’, banishes the perpetrator from the community….
Hm…
Let me put it differently. Moynihan had said something. What was it? A fact? Or an opinion?
Currently, we – well, most of us – believe that freedom of opinion is the cornerstone of our Weltanschauung. When it comes to facts… We’re OK with the definition – we do use the word/concept, quite extensively – but we seem to have some problems when dealing with the actual reality. Remember the still famous ‘alternative facts’?
Let me add something personal to all this. My opinion about ‘facts’.
The current definition is somewhat incomplete. We take something for granted. To the tune of no longer mentioning it. We assume all of us see the elephant in the room and no longer talk about it.
For something to become a ‘fact’ we have to notice it. First. And then we have to agree among ourselves about its meaning!
Things used to fall down since …. We’ve been discussing the matter since… we’ve learned how to speak! But gravity had become a fact only after Newton had noticed the famous apple, wrote about it and we agreed. Gravity had become a fact, and continues to be one, only because his contemporaries had agreed with Newton on this matter. And we continue to believe Newton was right!
In this sense, alternative facts have been with us since day one. Well, something like that… God had told something to Adam and Eve, the serpent had said something else… and the rest is history! For some…
Newton had said something to us. And most of us had chosen to believe him. Or ignore his words… Darwin had said something to us. Many of us have chosen to believe him. To accept his arguments about the matter. While some others have chosen to dispute Darwin’s findings. To actively negate Darwin’s explanations about how we’ve got here.
Gravity is a fact while Evolution is still a theory. Statistically speaking, of course.
In this sense, Moynihan was wrong. For his words to ‘hold water’, we must to agree on how to separate facts from opinions. Until we agree among ourselves about how to determine ‘factualness’, we’ll keep having to deal with ‘alternative facts’.
I actually cannot wrap this up before ‘unveiling’ my litmus test for factualness. Consequences.
Does it have consequences?
Yes? It’s a fact! No? Then it’s not – not yet, at least – a ‘fact’. It did happen – otherwise we wouldn’t be speaking about it. It even does have consequences – we do speak about it, but that occurrence doesn’t yet have meaningful consequences. It is not a ‘factual’ fact.
nicichiarasa 