It’s like y’all are basically happy with the dish we are, with the human stew as it is, and you just think it needs a little more of something, a pinch of empathy, some sugar to counter the salt or something.

Everything we do, everything we try looks like this to me, just add some good to the mix. Ah, OMG, I didn’t want to be topical but it’s exactly like the social media response to voter suppression: vote! – uh, they are canceling the votes, and same with this, they take the good things, cancel the good things, destroy the good things, we are “adding a little good”- more “good” votes – to an ocean of bad that we also create.

All your liberal/progressive ideas, sure, all terrific ideas – you gonna implement them at the same time as you keep cranking out criminals and soldiers, keep beating your children and imprisoning your depressed addicts? While you keep selling your neighbors the cheap plastic (petroleum) made crap that they have to buy again every year and send the broken and used stuff back to Asia or Africa to poison the world poor folks first?

I mean, I say ten times a day, the human nature myth says we are made evil and so anything that makes us evil, anything that breaks us to the bad side is obscured, neutered of it’s causative power, and that our human life is primarily concerned with this effort, that this is our social control, to break every human to the bad side, despite that this isn’t conscious, that we all seem to believe we are trying to make ourselves better, not worse, despite the world of evidence. Then again, the human nature myth derails the question and says, all that evidence is simply evidence of the evil that was already there. Apparently, the social controls simply fails, and our original condition rules and we spend our lives in the effort for naught, but still, all day we spend on the effort, despite we say all day it “does nothing,” you can’t fight human nature.

But this all day unconscious effort, it is a world of bad, and you cannot “make the world a better place” by ignoring it and just doing some random kindnesses. It’s all for naught. There are not enough small kindnesses in the world to get us to where we do ourselves more good than harm. Humanity will forever be a turnip soup – I hate turnips – despite your seasonings, if we keep putting turnips in it, is what I’m trying to say, and we are, constantly. Social control is a turnip, it’s supposed to be good for you and you’re only supposed to notice the trace elements, the spices.

Life is complicated, I mean over-complicated, infinitely complex, so clearly so that we all soon come to know we can never grasp all of it, or even a meaningful fraction of it . . . yeah, sorry, I don’t do rhetorical.

Are we so sure about that, I mean, is that global fact perhaps covering something, inducing apathy where perhaps we could find work to do? I’m very caught up in today’s politics, and this is like saying, “just because there will always be problems and poor people, does that mean we can’t feed this person at our door right now?” I’m saying how much of it is an infinite world beyond our grasp, and how much of it is that this infinite world of mystery is where we put stuff we don’t want to see, perhaps big things, things that are most of it, perhaps everything in the pile of what we all don’t know isn’t the same size?

I mean, that is often people’s last defence if they are faced with my thesis, is that nobody has the answers (in a conversation that starts with me saying ‘here’s the answer’), and this is the rationale, this is why my truth is not truth, because everyone knows there is no truth, so it couldn’t be, and there is no point learning or addressing the argument.

Ah, I’m sorry. I presented it like a rhetorical question, didn’t I, ‘are we gaslighting ourselves.’ It was a dirty trick, and I still don’t do rhetorical, of course this is me telling you that is exactly my experience of it, exactly what I have learned by just having a look at the unknowable anyway, because you never know and also because my personal life has taught me to trust but verify.

It’s a good policy, a good anti-gaslighting measure.

It’s how you find out it’s practically all turnips.

Jeff

Aug. 29^th., 2021

Good and bad, right and wrong, it’s meaningless, isn’t it. Good for what, wrong for what, of course? The generalized, overarching Good and Bad – these are good and bad for something, and all morality is a circle, its “immoral” because it’s wrong and wrong because it’s immoral, and just like the more immediate social debates today, there is no talk of what it’s wrong for. We’re all supposed to know – or rather, we’re all to pretend we know, and enforce this half concept upon one another: be good! For . . . you know, good. The folks the Left call “liberals” should perhaps feel their ears burning especially here.

For my purposes, good and right mean truth and peace, OK? Flip side, wrong and bad mean lies and violence – let’s say war. Conflict. OK?

When Jeff says “bad,” he means war and conflict. Bad things bring conflict, good things bring peace. I know, we all know this – oh no we do not. We think we do, sure.

When your brain does its thing, it doesn’t function in English, no more than your computer does, so “good things bring peace, we all know this,” is exactly the same meme as “your kids aren’t supposed to be hurting each other, so you must teach them right from wrong (by whatever expedient means).” The peace is lost in the second iteration, where we somehow transpose the equation into “whatever stops the misbehaviour is good.” I know.

Every theory, be it science or pseudoscience or straight up crackpottery, every single theory, every idea that purports to change the world has some part of the equation that doesn’t quite work, some part of the story we’re all supposed to understand and agree with for no apparent reason. This is my fatal flaw right here, and the above childrearing example is only that, an example at best and really, only one attempt to express my insight that we have redefined some possibly objectively bad things as “good things.” I say possibly objectively, but I have already stated my bias: good things bring peace.

Perhaps none of us have the perspective to judge this more objectively than that anyway. Within my scope here, though, it’s that we have redefined some bad things as good things, meaning we have decided that some of the things that bring conflict are “good things,” somehow, such as the above parental intervention, in the event that the parent wound up getting physical, tried to do something aversive. In these cases, I do declayuh, even if “successful,” the resultant peace is illusory, and on the whole, the net effect is to promote conflict, and I invoke psychology to support the point.

In bad times, in fascist times, it is all taken to its illogical extremes, that this sort of conflict enhancing “good” law and order are increased exponentially, and not only are the authorities increasingly rough in their suppressive punishments for “bad things,” crimes, but as though to make my point for me, calls for peace and non-violence, such as the Black Lives Matter protests become punishable crimes. In such times, we go from “some little bad – policing, spanking – for the greater good,” to “only the bad is good,” meaning only the violent “punishments” are good, and apparently asking for peace and non-violence is somehow bad and punishable with good old rubber bullets. The moral line shifts, because, as I began this thing, the moral line, in our world, is attached to nothing, only the disembodied, ephemeral “good” and “bad,” and what constitutes it comes and goes, pushed about by our unconscious internal climate and weather and worse.

It needs to be good for a reason – I propose my reason, that peace is promoted, from a psychological viewpoint – and bad for a reason, that conflict and war are promoted, which, as we see, easier to see in such times, our moral institutions are not only not stopping conflicts but as many say, creating them. The supposed good we get from them and from our conformity, obedience, the appearance of order is not peace, but rather a never-ending condition of war, forever won and forever lost and the spots of peace we ever seem to have are enforced by a sort of social martial law. I am trying hard not to use my usual buzzwords, but we have the institutions, the churches, the criminal justice system, some public education and still we live in a state of war and conflict, within and without our nation states, so they are either not working, or peace is not really what they are for, not really what they get us.

For context, European church and government in Canada are presently covering up the ongoing genocide of the Turtle Island peoples. These institutions carry war, not peace. Law and Order, of course – not peace, never peace.

So, let’s all just agree on my definition of morality here, that what is right and good is what pacifies, instead of the exact opposite of it, maybe abandon all our institutions – and everything will be fine, OK? We are on the cusp, but we are totally looking the wrong direction, as always, carrying war.

Jeff, updated

Aug. 18^th., 2021