The Identity of Opposites
People can easily see opposites as the same thing – as opposite ends of the same spectrum, to use one philosophical approach. I think this constitutes a serious danger (relativism) because it makes it easy to go even further, and eliminate morality altogether.
This is going to be a difficult issue to write about because our moral reasoning skills have atrophied so much. We seem to have decided that morality does not exist – while not making that decision at all – at least consciously. To put this another way – we have decided that people are no longer important – while not being conscious of this at all.
We have not only become inhuman – but antihuman. These people can say, with complete justification “We are perfectly normal!” While being the worst people in history.
I am poorly qualified to speak of this. I seem to be the sole survivor of an immense wreck, sitting in its ruins – wondering what went wrong. Everyone else is saying “Nothing went wrong!” Which seems ridiculous to me. Something went wrong – seriously wrong. But they don’t have the courage to say so.
Some people will agree, and point to all kinds of things as horrible moral problems. Or to even a vague unspecified problem that demands action of some kind – and the more drastic, the better. Usually this translates into military action of some kind.
I back off, and ask myself the simple question “How did people become unimportant?” And I don’t have to look far to see the answer – in my own past life. As a young man, I was told that wonderful things were going on - that my parents generation (the Great generation) had everything set up perfectly. And I believed that – although it did seem a bit far-fetched.
Gradually (over the next forty years) I realized this was a lie. Things were not perfect – but their opposite. And no one was noticing.
What to do? The first thing I did was to get depressed – really depressed, suicidal. The second thing was to bail out of America and live in Costa Rica. I did not do this as some part of a grand plan to save myself. I did it because I did not have much money to live on.
Coming here is not a solution to most people’s problems – as I (and many others) keep saying. Your problems will follow you down here. But for me, once I moved to a rural area (with a fast Internet connection) it gave me the opportunity to build a new life.
When I first moved down here, many friends from Silicon Valley were intensely interested in how I was getting along. But as I began to build my new life, they lost interest in me. My life was no longer applicable to their lives.
No trackbacks yet.