When the various governments around the world decide to make plans to get a human being into outer space or on the Earth’s moon, they often do what they can to create precautions to prevent loss of human life! Well, that is the plan for most governments. It is the plan for most companies too. Right?
The idea is that the more minds there are the greater the potential to problem solve is by Humanity as a whole. This is an idea looked out not simply over the course of a few days or weeks, or even a few years or decades. This is an idea more aptly applied to benefit Humanity over the course of several generations.
This is true because communication has typically been slow. Once upon a time years were required to traverse the globe and send a message by word of mouth; then mere months and well under two years. Eventually the ability to send a communication was shortened to minutes. Today we can send video and audio back in forth in real time with a mere delay of seconds! But no matter what, the meaningful return on investment still requires the time frame of more than one generation as the ability to comprehend an idea is still catching up to our ability to send messages; And for extra clarity, communicating an idea should not be interpreted as the same as understanding an idea.
It is this reason why invocations of morality vary wildly among different cultures and societies. Yet the fundamental purpose of morality is the same. It is always about creating communicable barriers to protect from the loss of Human life from other Human life. This rings true to varying degrees in every invocation of morality. The differences lay in which Human lives are more important or equal to other Human lives instead of all Human lives being equal or based on criteria befitting comprehension of such ideas.
This means that the protection of human life is a fundamental building block of morality. And morality is typically an idea invoked to maintain and improve the quality of Human life. So when Humanity makes choices which disregard human life or create hindrances to it with absolute intent to achieve a goal there is outrage among many of Humanity’s members.
This is why people feel sorrow, disgust, hatred, and other painful emotions when a member of its species is killed by another member. Most people, I argue, do not understand how to interpret why they feel these emotions. Yet they know at least in some sentiment that the loss of a Human life means the potential loss of all the value that mind may have contributed to the overall maintenance and improve of Humanity’s growth.
But what of acts of loss of life in the worlds which belong to birds, fish, reptiles, and other creatures we share this planet with? What happens when a parent bird pushes its offspring out of the nest for the first time to fly and the offspring doesn’t? What happens when those offspring fall and die?
Is the parent bird now a murderer? Is the parent bird immoral? No. Morality doesn’t apply to other creatures because those creatures cannot be reasoned with the same way we can reason with one another. Their ability to communicate and process complex abstract ideas similar enough to the way we can in terms of complexity is so inept that it could be considered not even there presently.
Essentially it is like an ant colony building a mound on the side of a super highway comprised of concrete automobile roadways, an elevated bullet train on a mag-rail, and a set of smaller paths and tunnels running parallel to them for pedestrians and cyclists. The colony of ants probably has no idea what the entire structure is, let alone what it is for and what the different things part of it are.
They just keep sending out members of the colony to scout. If they come back with useful information then they share it. If they don’t then they keep sending out more members to gather useful information. But what is useful information to them? Sources of food and that is about it! Their ability to process ideas is likely limited to their ability to interact with the world. They probably only have the capacity to think in the present more or less and understand very little beyond that.
The same holds true for fish which eat the offspring of their kindred species and lions which eat wildebeests and other creatures, including an occasional Human! Morality is an abstract concept which applies to those capable of understanding it; as the ability to communicate complex ideas evolves more and more, so too does the ability to reason out equally complex ideas. This, as far as we collectively understand, is an ability limited to Humanity.
Freedom, morality, and peace are ideas which are not natural as running rivers, thundering clouds, or quaking continents. These are ideas which are rooted in time and space just like Humanity is. We think about the past, present, and future. We consider the potential of others to create positive things for the maintenance and improvement of their lives as well as negative things which hurt and or hinder the lives of others. We understand fear of destructive potential and can be manipulated by such threats but a cow, dog, or fish pretty much cannot be threaten beyond the moment.
None of the other creatures on the planet we share with come reasonable close en masse to understanding such ideas the same way we do. And then there is the fact that we do not even understand these ideas exactly the same as one another.
Communication, including comprehension, is already difficult enough when expressing or relaying ideas which are tangible or readily interacted with any of the traditional list of senses; touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste. Communicating a concept such as a RED APPLE TREE allows us to communicate things we all can experience and thus giving us a strong concept of reference to build upon.
Abstract ideas, like freedom, peace, and morality, do not have these things. They require other abstract concepts and tangible concepts alike to comprehend. And this makes these ideas alien to the natural environment of the Earth when compared to the other more numerous creatures upon and in it. Where do we see fish, birds, and other creatures creating writing and art and entertainment even remotely close to what Humanity did twelve thousand years ago AND doing so as commonly as we did?!
Certainly there are many creatures which exhibit similar activities, actions, and interactions which can be viewed as on the path to what we call compassion, empathy, and morality; but they lack the ability to fully communicate these ideas. At least they lack the ability to explain to us that they understand them and or we lack the ability to understand them. Likely it is the former.
Therefore the idea that morality, freedom, and peace are components of Natural Law is something which should be challenged. I opt to suggest that advocacy of this might be nearly as dangerous as advocacy of statism, of government as being responsible for creating peace.
If people can understand that inciting violence or waging war for peace is like raping for virginity, then surely they can understand that advocating something asking for faith to be accepted is only slightly less of a problem than threatening violence to control behavior in order to encourage peace!
The idea is about comprehension through self desire and even encouraged peace by others, not ever through coercing behavior; even in self defense! (Such an idea may seem okay as an act of self defense. However, the overall concept is to only employ self defense as a means to end hostilities. Teaching peace through coercion, even in self defense is not voluntary. The act must be relayed and accepted in completely voluntary terms!) Also, when an idea is presented and faith, emotional manipulation, or coercion is interjected then, the idea is rendered incomplete, unclear, or unrefined thus questionable at best; detrimental to the maintenance of whatever noble idea is at its root at worst!
Whatever the purpose of peace, it must not be taught through means contradictory to itself. That teaches conflicting information and leaving the learner confused and not guaranteed to fully and clearly understand. Open for interpretation an idea becomes; and remarkably dangerous when the learner previously does not understand how to deconstruct ideas for the purpose of consistency. This is especially true when the lesson is correct but not in the order in which ideas can be understood as being built upon one another with simple and easy to recognize patterns or connections.
This becomes useful when the idea of freedom, peace, and morality are invoked through many definitions of Natural Law. The first glaring contradictions or lack of a complete and clear path of thought progression occurs when asking the following questions:
What do we want freedom from?
Why do we invoke morality?
Is peace really the end goal?
Just answering these questions alone is difficult for many people. It is the same when people are asked why we invoke mathematics. But one question in particular will have many answers. In fact it will have many more answers than the other two questions combined, I argue.
When people answer the question about morality, they invoke so many different ideas. In fact this is where the idea of having a complete and clear path of thought progression is simply not enough. People create ideas built upon things which cannot be proven or disproven, require faith, and often demand compliance under duress thus starting an idea from a fallacious middle point of thought. Such needs to be a straight line of thought built upon subsequent smaller ideas too; not just complete and clear but linear!
Essentially it is something like this:
When we want to learn how to perform semi-complex linear equations in mathematics we need to learn the following first. What are numbers and which order do they work from lowest quantity to highest and vice versa. From there we learn how to add and subtract, thus how to count faster. Next we will learn how to multiple and divide, how to count even faster. Following that might be fractions and exponents, allowing us to count parts of whole quantities.
And this is where everything gets complicated for people. Many people understand how to perform these actions. In fact many people will end up teaching how to perform these functions to others. But when the time comes to understand how to apply these functions to the real world without first having to be shown how, people often cannot do this.
Certainly people grasp the basics of counting, addition, and subtraction when using money. It is simple. But what of understanding the different variables in a linear equation to determine more complex and less common factors such as chances of an automated machine producing a defective component!? How many of my readers even understand what that could be referring too!?
This is a HUGE barrier for people. And this barrier is rooted in incomplete often unclear and never linear paths of thought progression! So why do we designate different quantities with different labels?!?
That is a huge question! It is a rather ENORMOUS question to contemplate!
Why do we invoke morality!? What do we want freedom from? Why do we want freedom? Why do we want peace?!
Those are questions which many different invocations of Natural Law do not answer or even address without requiring faith in something which cannot be proven or disproven. And this is why advocacy of Natural Law is often nearly as detrimental to the liberty movements as is statism to peace, freedom, and the idea of morality!
So if you are going to attempt to make a difference in the world by advocating dissent against government, do not be guilty of the same or similar mistakes as are those who you are dissenting against. The consistency of always defining terms is what makes or breaks a truly legitimate authority in terms of leadership, wisdom, and devotion.
Contradictions, uncertainty, incomplete ideas, and disorganized concepts do far more to turn people off from more efficient and effective means to achieving the noble intent of government than the actual atrocities people commit under any banner of government.
But what is the noble intent of government?
I guarantee you it is not for people to simply control everybody else because they are psychopaths and demand power. That is the short answer that a lot of people get because they are only seeing a couple of puzzle pieces to the whole picture. The people still calling government and its supporters sociopaths and psychopaths and sheeple are the same people who yet to pull back and look at the entire picture and see that the idea of government is noble in intent. It’s just that its means contradict its end goals.
As dissenters of government we tend to turn more people against us because we are nearly as guilty as they are of just as many contradictions, lack of clarity, incomplete ideas, and disorganized concepts.
And it is here that we find wisdom and truth in the following words:
Liberty and freedom will not be extinguished from Humanity due to precisely calculated offensive measures, but do to a lack of comprehensive defenses.
-JLD
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