Truth and Authority

[buddhasbellybuttonfluff]

It has occurred to me that people spend absurd amounts of time in championing "the truth," or any such ontological or epistemological branch. I find it fairly clear that these discussions never concern about the truth or reality, but merely reflect its virtue and the desire for effective application: How to live a happy and satisfactory life? Dogmatic abstractions and intellectualization kill all the fun, and without the fun we can't find any attractive virtue that leads to the Way. Otherwise the religious nutjobs and secular moralists would've long since turned the world into a loving paradise. Instead we have had waves of competitive rationalization and petty justification over the minute aspects of human behavior. Wouldn't it do much better if we taught our children that we can never give a comprehensive answer for anything and that they should act as the sole authors to decide what is good for them, instead of shoving to them the rigid dogmas of interference and inhibition? Feeling good leads to acting good, and making them go the other way around seems very backwarded to me.

 

Do we need to coerce and convince people to join a system of governance or money, or can they reach fair and mutually beneficial solutions without regulatory intervention from those who claim knowing better? For one thing, the emergence of hierarchies and jurisprudence endows the righteous with the licence to exploit and kill in the name of law and civility.

 

We raise the children to obey the statutes and conventions because we, the parents, think those exemplify the measures of good human life. We ask for more innovation and entrepreneurship from our children, but contradictorily to this we first make sure that they all follow a standard model of thinking and behavior. Yet people seem perfectly capable of finding the good by trial and error when the network of social interaction does not stop them from doing so and learning thus.

 

Show us; don't tell. Words imply a static presence, which is hardly enough to govern the world of changes.

 

Blessings

[Cloudhand]

Eye for eye, Tooth for tooth, is truth we need to get back to some old ways. Cloud