Monday 16 January 2017

How bad are 'things'? How bad are people?

The striking thing about the modern situation for me, from my perspective - is that most people think that things are OK and most people are basically 'good'. Whereas I have the perspective that our society is in a terrible way, and that the mass of people are more evil than ever at any time or place in history.

But in fact there is no conflict between these perspectives at the level of 'evidence' - the conflict arises from metaphysics. In other words the conflict of my view and the majority view is at the level of what constitutes 'bad'.

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Most people measure the badness of society in some publicly-detectable, measurable, material way - maybe in terms of wealth and poverty; pleasure and suffering; freedom or oppression; peace or violence; creativity or stagnation... and so forth. From such perspectives the modern world is maybe not bad, maybe pretty good...

But from my perspective, I am looking at the soul of people en masse - and I notice that people are alienated from nature, other people, and themselves - and that everything is regarded as arbitrary and temporary; there is no real and eternal pattern or purpose or unfolding shape to the totality of everything.

I notice that public discourse is wholly about measurements and inferred (but never actually known) feelings during mortal life, and that mortal life is regarded as all there is and without any larger context.

Most people regard economic collapse, war, famine, epidemics as the worst possible things that can happen.

But - when I am at my best, and thinking using my deepest (divine) qualities - I realise that the worst possible things are spiritual - things like denial of the reality of the real, hopelessness (despair), a conviction that life is senseless and goes nowhere, underlying and unsolvable guilt or resentment, and a desire for death and indeed for annihilation.

All of which amounts to the conviction of an ultimate, existential isolation - the unavoidable situation of everything always being cut-off from everything.    

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Most people measure the badness of people in terms of whether they are violent, altruistic, hard-working, well-mannered and so forth.

But I measure the badness of society in transcendental terms of whether we pursue The Good - that is truth, beauty, virtue in unity.

And I notice that the official Western version of Good - which we are encouraged to pursue, and which most people have internalised such that they are not explicitly aware of it - is an inversion (not complete inversion, but substantially so) of The Good as known through human history and in the majority non-Western world.

What The West calls Good is substantially what children, tribal people, genuinely religious people (past and present) call bad - whether in the realms of truth, beauty or virtue - and instead of unity, the world is understood in terms of multiple unrelated specialisms.

And that bad is strongly encouraged, promoted and rewarded both by the official world of government, bureaucracy, charities and mainstream religions, education etc and by the mass media.

So we have a world of expedient dishonesty, of hype and spin and deliberate misleading as well as aggressive lying on a massive scale - none of this repented. We have ugliness of art and architecture, theatre and movies, and the environment and of the organisation of life (the iron cage of bureaucracy in general). We have relabelled sexual manipulation and exploitation and objectification and obsession as virtue; and disorder as better-than-normal.

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So the essence of the massive disagreement between my interpretation of the badness of 'things' and people is simple - albeit based on assumptions that are usually unknown, denied or taken as facts rather than assumptions.

What is needed, perhaps more than anything else - is an awareness of assumptions and the fact that they are assumptions.

This is only a first step - but is probably the essential first step.