| ilya_shambat2004@yahoo.com 2005-08-05, 5:56 pm |
| Every religion, ideology and way of thinking has a light side and a
dark side. Both are logical consequences of each other.
Buddhism believes that, in overcoming desire and achieving through
meditation the higher state of mind, one achieves liberation from what
is inside and the world's shackles that keep him there, and rises into
a state of compassion and oneness with the true universe - the law of
cause and effect; at which point one does things that are in tune with
the truth of the universe and is, through that oneness, made joyful and
compassionate and truly free.
Light side: Achieving that state. Dark side: Prosecuting desire;
prosecuting life; as well as denying progress.
Rationalism and empiricism believes that the universe is rational, and
that by applying one's mind in a rational manner one gets to the top of
life.
Light side: Technological innovation and constitutional liberties.
Dark side: trivialization of beauty; seeing emotionality as inferior
function and suppressing all emotions except the essential hatred and
meanness and status-seeking that drives this arrangement; prosecution
of spirituality; seeing the bulk of humanity as insane or irrational;
destruction of all things, no matter how wonderful and how difficult to
create, that are not easily explainable or are vulnerable to attack;
heartlessness bred by explaining away all emotions rather than by
compassion and understanding; attack on things that that worldview does
not explain; and intellectual and emotional fascism that makes life
unendurable for real people, rightfully leading the real people to
rebel time and again against this monstrosity whenever it has appeared.
The New Agers and existentialists believe that each person is a master
of their destiny, and that all things that happen in a person's life is
a result of what's in his consciousness, or what's in his self, or
what's in his karma.
Light side: A way to activate parts of self that are otherwise not
found. A way for a person to take charge of his or her life.
Dark side: Complete lack of compassion, complete lack of ethics and
complete lack of goodwill. Utter injustice and cruelty. Dumping on
those who are being hurt and compounding injury with insult. Excusing
any form of hideousness toward others and blaming them for the result.
Capitalism claims to provide liberty through effort in the marketplace.
Light side: Making it possible for people to get what they seek through
their own efforts. Allowing wealth to build on itself and create better
lives the world over. Creating technological and social progress that
lead people to better quality of existence. Using the mechanism of
people's minds and work to improve the material quality of existence
and in so doing giving people options they did not have. Creating flux
between cultures that allows good ideas from each culture to improve
each other and to overcome the wrong in the other.
Dark side: Turning everyone and everything into a commodity. Destroying
camaraderie and appreciation for the world. Creating an exploitative
worldview in which everyone is a resource or a product. Making
competitive motive and profit motive the guiding purpose of human
existence while attacking all other motives, many of them far better.
Pitting all people against each other and bringing them to spend their
lives screwing each other, in the process destroying the benevolent in
the self and in the world.
The anti-intellectuals believe that all action based on ideals is
doomed to do wrong.
Light side: Preventing misconceived action.
Dark side: Preventing people from organizing for shared purpose.
Criminalizing the action that's based on ideals while embracing all
action that's not based on ideals. Making it right to do harm to the
next person or to compete with him while making it wrong to exhibit
goodwill. Embracing the degrading while prosecuting the uplifting. In
prosecuting the idealistic, allowing any action for as long as it's not
idealistically motivated - meaning allowing action that is of the worst
in man while prosecuting that which is of the better.
Socialism (not Communism which is more or less defunct, but European
socialism) claims to provide satisfying existence.
Light side: Indeed creating a more satisfying existence, with people
working less hours, having more time to enjoy life, being able to focus
on intellectual and artistic and scientific endeavors, while also
looking out for each other and striving for common goals.
Dark side: Social coercion and stifling of individuality. Unreasonably
high taxation and living expenses. Unwieldy public sector that stifles
a lot of worthwhile enterprises.
Democracy claims to level everyone and give all of them a shot at life.
Light side: Empowering everyone - including those who have
traditionally been degraded - and giving them a way to live.
Dark side: A plastic culture that shuns anything that takes more than
the length of a TV commercial to understand. Destroying accomplishments
that have taken tremendous intellectual and social work to achieve.
Taking things that are delicate and beautiful as a result of
cultivation and breaking them, making it impossible for them to impart
of their beauty. Degrading the exquisite and robbing the world of its
splendor. A mentality that seeks to drag everyone down into a toxic
swamp.
The people who believe in self-esteem have essentially placed their
faith, irrationally, in an idea that there is a single human nature
that, when given what they call self-esteem, will get the people to act
the way they want them to act. They've come to believe that the person
with true self-esteem will be essentially what they want a citizen to
be, and that his compliance with the mindset that they are serving will
be a consequence of having "high self-esteem."
Light side: Giving people who have been mistreated a way to esteem
themselves. Dark side: Everything else.
Meaning the following: Internalizing within the person's psyche the
agendas of those who want the person to be what they want him to be,
and in so doing destroying meaningful liberty.
Meaning the following: Splitting the mind into the judged and the
judging. Admitting into the mind a Trojan Horse of values of
preferences that are inappropriate for the person, and that result in
psychic entrapment. And pursuant that: Enslaving the person into an
evil mindstate, while profaning all in the person that is at a better
place.
Meaning the following: Invasive meddling in affairs of people who do
what they do not want people to do, and claiming it to be a problem of
self-esteem instead of a matter of choice, deliberate or undeliberate,
to act in the way they themselves choose to rather than in the way that
the military-industrial psychology wants them to act.
Meaning the following: Attacking the people who have experienced bad
circumstances and claiming that they cannot have a life. Compounding
the injury of the original violation with a far greater injury of
denying them the right to life and the right to a future. Keeping
people mired in psychological predation while making it impossible for
them to have an existence worth having. And far worse than that,
denying people love when they need it the most and have most to give.
Confucianism and Taoism deify two opposite aspects of existence - the
civilization and nature - and together create a life in which
civilization and nature, or the social and the creative, can coexist.
Light side: Creating a full experience of life, with the mind and the
soul working in synergy. Allowing people to be both the natural and the
civilized. Enriching the civilization with the wisdom of the Tao and
creating a social shunt.
Dark side: In deifying the social order, creating social oppression. In
denying the Taoist path to the majority of the population, condemning
majority to horrible existence while using the access to Taoist path
for some to claim moral legitimacy. Creating an inflexible order that
is not capable of progress and advancement, and that as such was easily
conquered by empiricists.
Nietzsche was first in Western philosophy to see the world not as a
battle of principles or ideas but as a matter of psychological forces.
Light side: Freeing the psychological forces from repression. Dark
side: Everything else.
Meaning the following: Degradation of every benign motive within the
man. Seeing all things in reference to psychological self-interest and
in so doing degrading all things that are of a more noble purpose.
Manifest especially in assault on all motives that seek to do good for
one's fellow man, that seek a world worth living in, that possess
goodwill and benevolence, or that have a higher wisdom and purpose than
ones of which Nietzsche was himself capable.
Meaning the following: Using monkey-brain analysis to create a world
that is far more oppressive than the preceding ones. A world of people
who are seen as monkeys, with every uniquely human motive attacked.
Degradation of all spiritual, inspired and innovative forces in human
beingness - the forces to which humanity owes all it has. Putting
advanced civilization, that became advanced as a result of people
forging ahead on inspiration and wisdom and spiritual revelation, to a
tribalist nightmare - a nightmare that became manifest in its most
hideous forms in 1940s, but that continues influencing people with
hideousness, including the monkey-brain concept of "adequacy" and other
prehominid assault on what is proactive, what is beautiful, what is
noble and what is benign.
Meaning the following: Hideous attack on anyone who has any spiritual
experience or poetic mentality and denying people all beautiful
experience in the world.
Meaning the following: Ugly reductionist mentality that cannot tolerate
for there to be good in the world.
Christianity claims to give freedom from the world and righteous
existence and eternal security through surrender to Jesus. It claims
that all are beautiful in the eyes of God.
Light side: The preceding.
Dark side: Suppression of genitality, entrenched chauvenism, and a
monstrosity: Claiming that people possess free will and using the
concept to bind them to one's purpose.
Now if a person possesses free will, then it is up to the person to
decide what he chooses to do with it. And if it is not acceptable for a
person to use free will in a way that does not suit you, then you have
usurped his will and made it not free.
Solution: Not free will in service of enslavement.
Not no will and enslavement as would follow someone without a will.
But free the will from all shackles, both externally and internally
conceived.
And use it to empower the motives of individual liberty of thought and
feeling and being, as well as the motives of benevolence, wisdom,
compassion, inspired thinking, romantic attitude and making life
beautiful and attained, for the living and yet to live.
Creating the best of all possible worlds: The world in which each
person is complete in expression of his or her individuality - and in
which these individuals use the place of liberty to reach out to the
world with compassion and wisdom and strive to make possible life worth
living for the existing and the yet to exist.
Any questions?
Ilya Shambat.
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