| Topic: |
Science > Philosophy |
| User: |
"Ilya the Bat" |
| Date: |
16 Jul 2005 02:05:00 PM |
| Object: |
Man and mankind |
"Mankind is great; it's people that are the problem"
- or -
"Man is vile; people are quite all right"
Where do you stand?
I believe the second side of each statement comes as result of the
first given the cultural scripts at play.
When you come from the position of scolding man for real and imagined
sins, you run into people trying to show you their best face. There are
people who want to disabuse you of such ideas by showing how good they
are; there are others who see your attitude as strength. To many you
appear to come from God-space, and people all want to show you how good
they are. You get generous contributions from men who see you as help
in controlling their families. You get seen as a voice to God. So that,
even as you come from the position of utter nastiness, you get
rewarded. And well, after a while you see that, hey, people are not so
bad after all. At least in the face they present to you.
When you seek the good of mankind you end up seeing the worst in
humanity. You get seen as weak or unrealistic, and to make the matters
worse people try to find reasons to deem you corrupt in character or
intent. Putting your faith in humanity, you run into people trying to
take advantage of you, people pulling nasty stuff on you, people trying
to drag you down to their level, and the far greater group that is
those who do not want this faith to reach those under their sway. You
run into people who see you as a threat to their oder, in which they
keep people under their thumb and don't want them to see a way toward a
better existence; in which they deliberately destroy people's
self-image in order that they not feel empowered to seek better
existence; in which they want to pit everyone against each other and
then place them under divide-and-conquer.
It's a conundrum that is indeed worthy of being pondered. The people
I've seen exposed to the very worst treatment, are ones that come with
the most open and most compassionate attitude. This is especially the
case for women. And it was the hippies especially, with their goal to
love everyone and their "we can work it out" attitude, that experienced
probably the most horrible treatment of any group in the history of
America. This, once again, is especially the case for women - as I can
see on the faces of women of that group that I run into, and as I hear
in testimonials by women I encounter on the net and in person.
Scott Peck had a story about how a friend of his kept talking about all
the evils of the world (racism, etc.) as the things that were "blocking
him in his success" or whatever. My response is: How could racism be a
problem for a white person? It had nothing to do with his success or
anything of the sort! The person was not talking about his life or his
"success" - the latter was probably the very last thing on his mind! He
was talking about the world: His self was identified with that of the
world and to him for as long as those problems existed then nothing
that he could do would matter! You call yourself a psychiatrist and not
understand such things?
So yes, we have the whole serve-mankind ideology, that manifests in
academia and other similar places, that seek to - well, serve mankind!
So we have people educated in that system, and for them it's not a
matter of "success" at all - it's a matter of making a world worth
living in! The Self Is Identified With The Good Of Mankind. We see that
in Woody Allen ("I can't be happy when someone is starving") and many
other interesting psychological phenomena along the same line. This is
not neurosis or psychopathology; this is a direct consequence of a
particular kind of education.
Now. The flow here is two-way. You serve mankind and mankind takes care
of you or whatever you are a part of. The mentality is: Yes we can get
all to agree and come together ("Come together, right now, over me")
and based on the place we take this - the place that spirituality
conceives as a heart-zone, but that in that particular situation sought
to take people into a place that they believed true man's nature to be
- the place of compassion, tolerance, creative unfoldment and
appreciation for the next person AND identification with - guess what -
the good of Mankind - the qualities they believed to be the true nature
of human being - people could all be free and be together, without any
strictures, be one in compassion and understanding and as a result of
that true individuality, united without any other needless incentives
or laws and guided by the love that ensued toward action that's good
for one and all; an E Pluribus Unum in its true sense - the unity in
diversity and diversity in unity - the man in mankind and mankind in
man - because, once again, that's what was believed to be the true
nature of man and true nature of humanity.
By breakind through social rubbish into true understanding - the
"awareness" and "consciousness" they talked about - could be manifest
each person's true self - the soul, if you will - and then - as a
consequence of resulting wisdom and understanding that once again were
believed to be its true quality (it being that way as consequence of
evolution to be in its highest way a desire to serve mankind while
having something original itself to offer), in absense of social
personas (the word "persona" in Latin means "mask") could exist the
truly man and mankind - and mankind and man - with all united in
compassion and understanding and - yes - AWARENESS - and as a result of
that also free to be one's own self.
Now there are people who think liberalism to be "based in emotions" or
hypocrisy or being mindless. In fact, this was something that was the
consummation of striving of great people throughout the world's
history. After the self has been cleared of false notions, it's free to
love (that, not mere casual sex, being the meaning of "free love.") To
"blow one's mind" was one path - the idea having also existed in
Buddhism but accomplished through more intensive and disciplined
action. This is what liberalism is based on: The idea that man's true
nature is good; that it is adapted for the benefit of humanity, and as
part of that possesses compassion, understanding, broad perspective and
the particular form of love that unites it with the next person and the
benefit of humankind (and in cases of many people life) as such - while
also possessing its own kernel of creativity and individuality that
allows it to not only appreciate and accept freedom in self and the
next person but to contribute what is contained in it for the good of
the world. And that by getting through to that nature and allowing it
to blossom is given a way to do good for people and the way to oneself
be good.
So far, so good. So I keep hearing "dig deeper" and I'm looking more at
the E Pluribus Unum stuff: To free man's soul and mind from entrapment
and let it go into the all-species "consciousness" in which truly one
is with all and all is with one, and we have both true individual
freedom AND unity in - yes, say the dirty word - AWARENESS and
understanding; to take the spirit of people into a place that
identifies with mankind - the place where not only "we are all
together" but each is his own; that finds unity of purpose and wisdom
in "species consciousness" and as an outgrowth of that achieves freedom
to be its true self.
Is this the true view of what is human being? It may or may not be; I
see the human being as capable of being all kinds of things and
possessing all kinds of levels. I've definitely seen however the
situations in which this idea can appear the truth. The real idea
behind liberalism is as I said before: The faith that the human nature
is of a particular kind, and when got to the core - when got to the
soul - and making the social climate hospitable to that - is achieved a
world in which people have - yes - AWARENESS - that allows them to see
beauty in each other; seek the good of each other and of the world;
blossom into freedom and demand freedom for the next person; and in the
words of a friend get humanity into a place of beauty, compassion,
wisdom and eros, in which man can live in mankind and mankind in man!
What people who don't understand the concept don't understand is that
here we are dealing with the view of what a man is at his essence and
what is his true nature and how mankind can function in a way that is
at its best interest, both for man and for mankind.
And of course if this is how you view true human nature to be - if you
believe "mankind is good" - then you will be aghast at what stands in
the way of that. Hence, unless you know your stuff, "it's people that
are the problem." If you don't believe in the consciousness movement
worldview that I have just articulated, but still want the world to do
well & to serve the good of mankind, you bet you run into all kinds of
garbage. And the correct attitude, as some have informed me, is to see
the garbage for what it is and defeat it and allow the truth to come
through. The problem I've seen is people having a wrong view of what is
the truth and what is the garbage.
And the way I've seen to be the only true way to live is this. Demand
complete liberty for oneself and live life absolutely - while also
doing good for one's fellow man.
That way, you come away having lived and you've done what actually
benefits other people. Thus, both sides of the world you affect -
yourself and other people - benefit, and you have lived having given
the most and having known what life is and how it can be lived.
So I'm standing in the subway, doing Tai Chi, and there's a dude who
looks like a kozyol (but a good kind of a kozyol) and he tells me that
he has a literature PhD but he's tired of academia because they think
they're open minded but are not. Then he says he got job as a salesman
and they taught him techniques of coercive-manipulative salesmanship
and he has too much of a conscience to practice them. So now he's just
a kozyol like me, and we talk about how biz & academia hate each other
& both are full of bigtime kozyols, and sinse the kozyols are supposed
in the end to be separated from the ovtsi guess who wins? Yes, yes, the
dudes who say man is vile.
Which men, before these dudes, put on an act of what good ovtsi they
are, while they go on molesting their daughters and beating their wives
and pulling the kinds of crap that Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis would
only see as the next generation of what they have talked about while
shouting about the evil liberals and the airhead intellectuals and how
they represent true traditional family values that made this country
great.
Pass me some LSD.
Ilya Shambat.
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
