Between Good and Evil, I Side With Nature
I read a lot about the war in Iraq -- I mean, the coming slaughter of the untechnologized natives -- and it makes me grin slightly sadly to think of the humor of declaring oneself "moral" and therefore going after "the bad people." Who could live up to that, dealing with more than a few people; rephrased, this question is, who would want to make themselves that yardstick? Not I - "evil" republics and "good" republics, like people, are each a mixed bag.
Of course, this has the virtual Jerry Springer Audience tamatoguchi screaming, "But why does 'evil' exist then?" Having been an expert on evil for some time, my answer snaps back like a punch at an ARA rally: evil is our way of characterizing what doesn't go our way. No lollipod? Bloody hell. In America, we've been taking what we want and making insane profits for so long that we think 'evil' is anything that threatens our ability to make millions from oil futures.
Evil is just another mental justification, a symbol that's religious because you have to believe to think it's real. Illusion, as Buddhists might say. There are no evil republics and our inner sense of 'morality' is rotted to the point where it pursues only appearance. It's easy to talk shit about GWB, but is he any different than Clinton the comical criminal? Are either of these guys doing anything but a job? Their job is to keep the wealthy industries happy.
And it makes me laugh to see the right-left split keeping you all baffled. I run into these pie-eyed leftists who assure me that inegalitarianism is the greatest evil, that a White Supremacist empire runs the united states, and that there's a crazy group of elites who have a holy war to keep down the more talented, impoverished brown peoples of the third world. The right as known to most of America seem to me to be slightly hardboiled liberals, and the far right -- despite their correct identification of religions like Christianity and Judaism as an insane part of the problem -- often become tied up by their own doctrinaire approach. What's a boy looking for truth to do?
The first thing I'm doing is dropping any kind of pro-human viewpoint I have, and by that meaning anything that assumes humanity is any different from any other animal. We do what feels good, including what benefits us. Our greed is self-preservation. We aren't good or evil, but we are in competition, so it becomes useful to characterize each other as absolutes:stupid, gay, evil, good, ally, enemy. Oh, and we respond to self-programming, so given healthy values we respond and build healthy societies.
As I'm watching the USA spin and twist to justify its Judeo-Christian war against all that isn't capitalist Christian and allied with Democracy in the middle east, I'm sitting back and siding with nature. It's not a he or a she or an it, but a series of principles that control the equilibrium of this universe. Whatever those are however, they're going to in time start bringing down that which claims too much moral authority by the very nature of power that moral authority must wield. My final metaphor is this: power is like a drug. The more you can get, the better it is, but the more intoxicated you become, the less likely you are to see the thug in the corner with your name on his bullets.
Of course, this has the virtual Jerry Springer Audience tamatoguchi screaming, "But why does 'evil' exist then?" Having been an expert on evil for some time, my answer snaps back like a punch at an ARA rally: evil is our way of characterizing what doesn't go our way. No lollipod? Bloody hell. In America, we've been taking what we want and making insane profits for so long that we think 'evil' is anything that threatens our ability to make millions from oil futures.
Evil is just another mental justification, a symbol that's religious because you have to believe to think it's real. Illusion, as Buddhists might say. There are no evil republics and our inner sense of 'morality' is rotted to the point where it pursues only appearance. It's easy to talk shit about GWB, but is he any different than Clinton the comical criminal? Are either of these guys doing anything but a job? Their job is to keep the wealthy industries happy.
And it makes me laugh to see the right-left split keeping you all baffled. I run into these pie-eyed leftists who assure me that inegalitarianism is the greatest evil, that a White Supremacist empire runs the united states, and that there's a crazy group of elites who have a holy war to keep down the more talented, impoverished brown peoples of the third world. The right as known to most of America seem to me to be slightly hardboiled liberals, and the far right -- despite their correct identification of religions like Christianity and Judaism as an insane part of the problem -- often become tied up by their own doctrinaire approach. What's a boy looking for truth to do?
The first thing I'm doing is dropping any kind of pro-human viewpoint I have, and by that meaning anything that assumes humanity is any different from any other animal. We do what feels good, including what benefits us. Our greed is self-preservation. We aren't good or evil, but we are in competition, so it becomes useful to characterize each other as absolutes:stupid, gay, evil, good, ally, enemy. Oh, and we respond to self-programming, so given healthy values we respond and build healthy societies.
As I'm watching the USA spin and twist to justify its Judeo-Christian war against all that isn't capitalist Christian and allied with Democracy in the middle east, I'm sitting back and siding with nature. It's not a he or a she or an it, but a series of principles that control the equilibrium of this universe. Whatever those are however, they're going to in time start bringing down that which claims too much moral authority by the very nature of power that moral authority must wield. My final metaphor is this: power is like a drug. The more you can get, the better it is, but the more intoxicated you become, the less likely you are to see the thug in the corner with your name on his bullets.
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Subvert the dominant paradigm, don't be a solipsist.