No one is better or worse than anyone else - there is no means by which this can be comparatively evaluated.
Individuals are psychological-social constructions. There are similarities of structure and form in both the human neurological patterns as well as in our social experiences - thus there will be overlap between individuals, to some extent.
1 and 2 above do not conflict.
Every individual is unique, and is what he/she ought (is “supposed”) to be - if only because there is no standard of perfection, no goal, no aim, no end - no “supposed to”. Everything is a reaction, a response.
What does this say about your beliefs here, about all beliefs regarding judgment of superiority and inferiority, of groups or of individuals? It says that judgment is always wrong, because it is always fallacious. No one has any true (real, in reality) means or ‘right’ to judge or evaluate another by - individuals may be judged accurately only by themselves, and even this possibility is rare.
Further to this is the fact that, of course, we are psychologically predetermined to engage in judging-behaviors and judgemental thoughts. This tends to work against our realising the fallacious and harmful nature of all judgment.
To believe that any individual is “better” or “worse” than any other individual, by any standard or measure whatsoever, is incorrect and false. Furthermore do not forget that we are psychological constructions - most of what we “believe” is absolutely untrue and unreal, and exists only in that it serves a temporal or momentary psychological need, or fills an internal mental or emotional vacuum, or is a copied meme or symbol-set imprinted from outside upon the individual psyche.
I think most difficulties with understanding belief, in general or our own specific beliefs as individuals, can be resolved by habituating our conscious awareness into a more deliberately psychological-social context. But do keep in mind that this psycho-social context I speak of here need not ignore the subjective, or the empirical - indeed these are also more accurately explained within the psychological-social context anyways.
Belief is indeed the antithesis of ‘reality’ - but then of course we need to discern what reality is, and what the relationship between psychological construction and so-called “reality” entails, which may be beyond the scope of this topic.
All meets in the same place. We only need to learn how to look, how to adjust our perspective sufficiently. But of course it is not easy to think of ourselves as psycho-social constructions, not in any real and personal sense - such knowledge is usually considered only abstractly. Make it concrete, make it real, make it personal, a product of your own personal experience and validation - and you might see what I am (perhaps ineffectively) hinting at here.
So you think, tentative, that this is all it takes, balancing our emotions and our intellect? Though I do understand what you are saying in a sense, at the same time…all this might succeed in doing is to make us more comfortable with what we believe…this belief may have no basis in reality, as many of them don’t.
It isn’t just our hearts that can lie to us, deceive us, because of what we desire, what we need to believe - it is also our minds too…we can rationalize anything. Our minds can make us believe anything. I think the process is more in examining and exploring what our mind is saying to us; in other words, questioning our own mind’s thoughts, re-examining them, and why we believe what we do. In other words, do our thoughts and beliefs really have any basis in reality. We might intellectualize all we want and it might be no more than rationalizing.
But what if what we think, what we say, and how we act are simply based on our own faulty perceptions, and not in reality, as many of ours aren’t. Is this three-legged stool a prerequisite for reality and honest beliefs, insofar as any beliefs can be honest…or is the examining of WHY what we think, say and how we act, the prerequisite for reality and honest believing. You seem to be putting the cart before the horse here.
You make some good points reddragon, aka arcuturus.
I made a post recently on here about rationalizing and how can you tell when you are rationalizing vs. being rational.
As you say, since anything could be us ‘kidding ourselves’ (at any level that is intellect/heart/instincts whatever) then I think self reflexivity is the key and thorough philosophical investigation of all our currently held perceptions.
I must be missing something here – since we examine, question and explore using our mind, how is this different than being “informed by mind” and the skepticism JT refers to in his earlier post? I guess I’m not getting the distinction you’re making.
Isn’t the only way of “examining of WHY what we think, say and how we act” by using our minds?
While on the one hand I think this is useful, I also think this is misleading, so I’m going to try to muddy things up. (If you damage the emotional parts of the brain, people become illogical - I can try to find something from the works of Damasio to back this up, though it’s an aside.)
My main point: we have, too much in philosophy, granted the scientists the foundation of knowledge. It science can determine something then we defer to science, often because science is ‘objective’ and unaffected by emotion. I want to challenge that notion. Pardon me for being scattershot when I do this. Science has been a male dominated field and I would guess that most women making their way into that field made sure they came off like men - at least at work. And not simply men, but men with certain kinds of temperments. What is that like? As opposed to oxytocin based views of the world - where relations are seen as internal to the identity of things en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_o … _relations
we have testosterone views where things out there are seen as separate individuals with properties that they ‘have’.
These pages are from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway and describe the metaphysics of individuals.
So men set up this approach to gaining knowledge based on separation, distance, a metaphysics of individuals
and also on assumptions of deadness and a lack of sentience. These are the rules, anomalies are exceptions, humans being one.
Their methodology for gaining knowledge radically whittled down the experimenter/object relationship to one of emotionless observation - onesided too.
And what did they keep finding…
well for a long time they found separate individuals. Local affects. Life as exception. Consciousness as exception. Hell, animals weren’t even granted consciousness until the very, very late 20th century by mainstream science. Plants? forgetaboutit.
The eye found the world. The methodology found the world that fit itself.
A jump:
If someone wants to learn about another person ruling out intimacy rules out important areas of knowledge.
Scientists would have us believe that this is an exception.
I am not saying that emotions and self-interest cannot distort knowledge. In fact I am saying that the whole of science reflects a fear of emotions and an urge to control. It is a methodology based on one way of dealing with affect.
Now clearly it is a very useful methodologies or set of methodologies. I am not saying science is wrong, hardly. And, in fact, the 20th century saw huge changes in reductionism - concepts of emergence and holism came into play - ecological viewpoints…qm challenged action at a distance and locality and many individuals began to be seen as portions of different kinds of webs, their properties not something they have but rather are dynamisms that are shared.
in that it leads us in very strange and contorted laboratory conditions to be able to repeat certain kinds of experiences. We can experience breaking h2o into two gases, for example. But it is only one kind of knowledge and I suspect that what have seemed impure forms of understanding water will come more to the fore as time goes on.
So how does all my mental gymnastics help us with the OP and relations between the sexes or different viewpoints.
Well, first I want to get in that knowledge is like a shorthand for what you will experience. And Agape may indeed experience something like what you say above. But what does that mean? Does it mean that that is the way things are? I think that gets complicated. So many issues. If we move to the experience of african americans in say the late 60s in the job market. I can imagine affect based knowledge on their part about what was really going on in certain office politics, with nice liberals who want, at least, not to be racist, being more correct than statistics or whatever objective program of information gathering managed to come up with. Or women when dealing with men who say they are not sexist but think that women are better at some roles, but still affect based knowledge keeps saying, this guy thinks I am less than him, not simply different.
One of the things that science tries to do is eliminate intuition. What this does however is make it seem like those who have excellent intuitions - perhaps on a certain issue they have a lot of experience with, perhaps a born skill - must set aside their intuition because other people aren’t as good. Or a japanese team of scientists cannot use her intuition about the Higgs Field in their experiments. Some people have poor intuitions about certain things or many things or everything other than motor skills. This doesn’t mean those who do have strong intuitions must throw out their babies (with the bathwater).
This is incomplete but maybe it can get a ball rolling. From here my ideas get even weirder and I’ve already probably come off as biology is destiny and seem like the sexist I described a little ways above. But as one hint of where I will go
I think that sexism is a problem of not feeling enough and thus not allowing these suppressed feelings to influence cognition
rather than
a problem of emotion influencing cognition. In fact I would say cognition is the sinner.
If I may be so bold as to answer for Arc here, it is a question of types of thinking, which are qualitatively different from one another and not merely just manifestations of variation by degree or situation. Yes, we must “use our minds” to “explore our minds”, but this simple ‘fact’, itself not much more than a linguistic oversimplifying and rhetorical playing on words, does not preclude the possibility of genuine self-knowledge or deep introspection. It only appears circular as long as you conceive of habitual non-conscious thinking and self-aware conscious meta-thinking as the same type or of the same form/function, which they are not.
Automatic habitual or beliefs-based thinking which has as its object sensations or stimuli is quite different from deliberate consciously self-aware-based thinking which has as its object other thoughts, or other mental events or experiences. There is a fundamental difference between thinking and meta-thinking, one that meditation or sincere self-reflection will reveal, and perhaps that can only be known about in such a personal and intimate way.
Moreno,
Very thought-provoking remarks. You packed a lot of different subtopics in your post and I for one would be interested in hearing more.
I looked a bit through the excerpts of Karen Barad’s book but it was difficult – probably due to my own lackings in both philosophy and science. I partially got what she was saying as far as agency and the ontological nature of our physical bodily confines - the idea that our situatedness affects knowledge is one with which I agree wholeheartedly - but in other sections, as soon as I felt like I was getting a grasp on the material, the excerpt cut out and started in on a different section. It sounds like a book I’d be interested in reading through from start to finish though. On a related note, have you read Carol Yoon’s Naming Nature? It’s along the same lines – highlighting the detrimental ramifications of the scientific quest for pure objectivity.
In any event, I don’t disagree that science isn’t the be-all, end-all as far as knowledge is concerned. Can you expand upon what you mean when you say that what have seemed to be impure forms of understanding water will increasingly come to the fore?
The Last Man,
Thanks for your response. I understand the difference between thinking and meta-thinking, I guess as I read JT’s post, nothing there precludes meta-thinking. He specifically mentions skepticism, as well as the idea of revisiting and altering our beliefs - to me all of that entails “meta-thinking.” But maybe it would be best to let him respond, in case I am misunderstanding.
That is a damn deep question, I must say. I suppose this does hit at the heart of the matter here. On the one hand, if this relation is found to be sufficiently circular, false or nonexistent in some manner, it would seem to undermine out of necessity everything we are trying to accomplish by understanding the nature of belief itself - it would ground belief squarely in the realm of fantasy. Which, by the way, is where I tend to think it mostly lies. Yet on the other hand, this relation between belief and reality, even if it necessarily rests upon faith and believing, could potentially be explained and understood in a way that sheds light on the possible situations or instances in which belief may in fact touch upon reality at all, and in this sense “cleanse” belief of its fantastical nature to leave behind only that which is genuine and true. And still a further possibility is that we may end up affirming the reality of belief in a subjective sense while denying the reality of “reality” itself in anything but a likewise utterly subjective manner. If this takes the form of internalising subjective reality to the human perceptive/conscious experience then the fantastical natures of belief and reality both may merge or overlap, solving this ‘problem’ in an indirect and perhaps unsatisfactory manner - if this takes the form of denying an absolute internalist perspective and maintaining the likelihood or necessity of external reality despite the incontrovertible subjective nature of this reality, we are then left with the same problem with which we began.
As that seems to frame the context of possible answers or methods of reconciliation here, it all hinges upon the possibility of even defining and examining “reality” in a sufficiently concrete or meaningful way - and I can see the case being made that this is absolutely impossible. If an operative or functional definition of reality cannot be established which is acceptable to all parties here as well as sufficiently concrete, non-contradictory and explanatory then the entire question seems meaningless to begin with. So I guess I will answer your question with two questions: 1) what is the possibility that we can define and understand “reality” in such a way as to even allow meaningful debate and discussion at all, and 2) given that 1 is possible, if my above framing of the context of possible answers and outcomes of this examining of the relation between belief and reality is accurate, which of these possible outcomes do you consider likely or most ideal - or, if none, then do you feel that some or all of them are sufficiently hopeless or meaningless in terms of the intent of the question of the relation between belief and reality itself as to preclude this entire conversation altogether?
Hmmm, I thought I was done here. Several people have questioned my post(s), and that is good. I’ll try to 'splain a bit further. Explanations are necessitated by philosophy-lite three sentence glosses of which I am constantly guilty.
Some basic assumptions:
All states of being lack complete knowledge. This means that whether affective or cognitive input, error isn’t just possible, it is assumed. The brain, lacking complete knowledge, introduces error - including information about itself. (this for Arcturus). We can look at this and say it is a hall of mirrors, throw our hands in the air, and resign ourselves to a pursuit of chocolate truffles, (not a bad idea) or we can attempt by way of a self-checking method of inquiry, begin the process of verifying what we say we know. (science, anyone?) But all of this relies on the understanding that beliefs and our reality constructs are an approximation. The lack of complete knowledge introduces the term “close counts”. This is all very simple, but amazingly, we forget or ignore it on a constant basis.
So on to thinking… There is a qualitative difference in modes of thought (thank you, Last man and Moreno). Introspection involves a lot more than thinking about whether to have a big mac or a fishburger for lunch. Given that we know we will be constantly in error, introspection is where we challenge ourselves. (skepticism) Isn’t it ironic and telling that we call this a “reality check”? All who involve themselves in introspection must first choose a method of inquiry in which they feel comfortable, and that the thought process is as error free as possible. I choose science, not because it is perfect, but because it challenges itself. The correct use of the scientific method is a constant effort to disprove itself. Science can create “facts” through repeated testable experiments, but it does not deny the affective in favor of cognition. When it comes to deciding what a fact or group of facts means, scientists have the same questions as all of us. Do these facts match up with what we think is reality? The power of science isn’t in what it can “prove”, but in performing that constant check on itself which creates the flexibility to adjust what we think we know and from that, alter our cherished beliefs. Is it perfect? Of course not, but it satisfies “close counts”. Perhaps the most valuable part of the scientific method is that it places restraints on runaway imagination. It precludes belief in untestable speculation. It puts an end to belief in flying spaghetti monsters and aliens as an explanation.
But there is more to man/woman than science. Like it or not, we live in the constant ferment of emotion, mind, and imagination. Our beliefs and our realities are in constant flux as we take in ever-changing information and experience. That’s what you get for being a sentient creature.
At bottom, the very best we can do is get close. Reality is within, not without. Remember, it’s all in your head.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m off in search of a truffle…
Do you know this, or merely believe it?
What do you believe 2+2 equals?
Do you know what knowledge is?
Of course you do. Knowledge is a second-order construction; a construction about our constructions. Our constructions are imperfect reflections of a chaotic reality, but we can handle them as good as perfectly. They’re tied into and out of our language. You know what your words mean, you have to; their meaning is what makes your knowledge relevant to anything.
Only if you believe it… Knowledge needs justification, belief doesn’t.
As far as Barad’s book, yeah it is damn hard. She’s a theoretical physicist AND a queer theorist who mingles Niels Bohr and Foucault. I had to reread sections a number of times, though it’s been worth it. Basically the idea of seeing the world as a bunch of (separate) things, each with properties - that are not relational - is one way of seeing things and it seems like quantum mechanics - and queer and other identity theories - show this way might be wrong. I had to work very hard to get what she was saying, but once I got it - and it doesn’t stay all the time in my head - I realized that I did see things the other way also.
Oh, God. One of the more controversial areas. Well, I’ll start less controversial. A child who loves playing in the waves may be an expert in water and understand water in ways that scientists, who don’t get out much, do not understand. Some of this knowledge is procedural - how to get her body in position so the wave breaks just past her position, how to brace in the sand so she is not pulled into the next wave, etc. - some tacit - she can’t say it, but she can do it - some declarative - she can tell her younger sister how to do it, how it will feel, how water ‘works’, and so on. Technologically, at this point, she has little to offer directly - though a clever scientist might find her a great collaborator. But in terms of knowledge of water she may have insights well beyond the guy in lab who sunburned easily as a kid and avoided the beach.
OK. that’s not too weird. I do think we will find that water does remember what comes in contact with it. IOW things like homeopathy. I also think we will find that water in cells has properties like organic crystals. That our nerve system is not remotely enough to explain how we can react with such coherence and unity and so fast. That the reductionism into parts is also misleading.
IOW thingspatterns that we mere lay, non-scientists may notice even better than they do, in part because we are intimate with them. They may catch up, of course. And notice how they will claim that they showed it was knowledge.
Affective disorders aside, normal emotions only take root in the intellect. Feelings don’t just happen, they are emotions we choose to have. They are knowledge-framed experiences that are sustained by continually thinking about them. One thought can expand and have an affect on every cell in your body. And the feeling, where is it? It manifests itself in the body, not in some vague belief-oriented phraseology or notion in the mind. The reality is in the physical aspect of your being.
Meanwhile, the meaning or purpose of the life of the body is already operating there in a real and objective way since it does so autonomously. Due to the fact that the physical/biological organism functions in a smooth, peaceful manner, any sensual pressure – the kind resulting from prolonged exposure to the intrusive nature of thought’s desire to keep the emotion there – plays havoc on the nervous system in proportion to the gravity of the emotion. In its task to absorb unfavorable stress, the body wars against the provocative interloper. The body reacts to too much pleasure in the same way it reacts to too much pain; it is rejecting what is produced by the continual interference of mentation in order to preserve the sensitivity of the nervous system. The body can take care of itself if you give it a chance. It will only honor a physical solution. Not a psychological one.
Truffles are good for you! Try one or a dozen… but knowledge as a construction of our constructions? Oh my yes! You’ve got it. But there is a little sticky part that is too often ignored. Yes, I know what I mean by the words I use. Do you know what I mean by the words I use? Up to a point, the answer could be yes. We can spend some time getting as close to an agreed upon definition as possible, but there is no one-to-one understanding inside of language. Any word or concept within language only has meaning within the context of experience., and no matter how much we say we agree, we do not share the same experience. Therefore, our beliefs and realities may be consonant in general, but never in detail. And isn’t it surprising what pops up in the details?
What is knowledge does require justification (and I determine what is justification). Personal beliefs are based on my imperfect knowing, and are therefore justified - or I wouldn’t have those beliefs. Obviously, we can and are fed beliefs through enculturation, but those are generalized and our specific personal beliefs are the product of introspection assuming we are capable of such.
It is only important to be aware that no method of inquiry, no instrument (mind) is capable of perfect knowing. I’ve heard a few people claim perfect knowing, but they haven’t provided much justification. So back to imperfect everything… We can get close, and close enough for general muddling through, but it remains “close counts”.
Very true … also, we can take the water (the medium upon which the wave travels) to the lab and analyze its constituent elements, but we cannot capture the power and dynamism of the movement of the wave.
Likewise, thought, belief and ideation cannot capture life because those are something dead and cannot touch the life-energy essence.
It seems that we can recognise the limits and potentials for falseness that lie within thinking and belief without throwing the entire conceptual-cognitive process out entirely, or with also admitting that thought is a strange, wonderful and powerful human phenomenon which is capable of tremendous good or bad (in terms of our health as a living entity), depending on how we use it.
Without thinking, we could not survive, period. Our instincts and physical bodies alone are not up to the task. Thinking helps us to understand nature, each other and ourselves, and despite that much of the time what we think and believe is incorrect or results from psychological abnormalities or neuroses, thinking remains a fundamental method and means by which we encounter reality - our own internal reality as well as that ‘outside’.
I maintain that we ought to strive and make thinking honest and accurate and rational, as well as open and intuitive and aware - to reach a holism within the mind, between thoughts, feelings, instincts and intuitions. Part of this process lies in deconstructing the power of paradigms within us, as I have written a bit about here. Other parts of this process involve opening ourselves up to each element of contact we have, each line or direction of energetic flow that bridges the human consciousness and “everything else” - as well as bridging the human consciousness to itself.
Lets nurture and expand all aspects of the human consciousness, all modes of personal experience - lets grow them and refine them by making them honest and healthy to the greatest extent we can.
Moreno,
Okay but when I used water as an example of knowledge, by saying that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, I didn’t mean to imply that those properties are everything that is or can be known about water; I used that only as an example of knowledge in direct contrast to a belief about water. So I wouldn’t claim that knowing its chemical makeup is the same as having all-encompassing knowledge of water, but I would claim that that particular piece of knowledge differs from, say, the belief that holy water has protective qualities.
In your example of the child who has in-depth knowledge of water, how it flows and how to move within it, isn’t that really just physics? She might not be able to describe it in scientific terms, but when it gets right down to it, would her knowledge/understanding really be any different than that of a physicist who’s studied water?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not an advocate for the reductionist view. I think that approach is too limited to provide a comprehensive explanation for the way the universe works. I don’t think the explanatory arrows always point down; that biology can always be reduced to chemistry which can likewise always be reduced to physics.
But sometimes it can, and I don’t think emergence negates that. Rather, emergence seems to complement that, and the two together comprise a more complete worldview. Reinventing the Sacred is another excellent book on this topic, but also difficult - I think I’ve had it for over a year and I’m still rereading it in my attempt to fully understand all of it. Really compelling - albeit dense - stuff.
Don’t get me wrong Last Man, all your posts are lucid and well thought out, but sometimes thought is violent, sometimes divisive. The love/hate relationship comes to mind. They are not so diametrically opposed, but two sides of the same coin being that their source is the same: thought.
We may cover things up with wonderful romantic phrases, yet some of the ideals in which we invest our thought and effort can be a source of consternation to an opposing group wielding adverse conceptions of our lofty goal. Thought supported ideas are sometimes fought to the death over. And we’re just talking about some stupid idea here. Maybe the idea is construed as significant, but really, come on now … nothing is worth dieing over.
But we now have come to a point where we can realize that violence is not the answer, that it is not the way to solve human problems. So, terror seems to be the only way. I am not talking of the terrorism we see today: blowing up things and all that kind of stuff, but the terror that if you try to destroy your neighbor you will possibly destroy yourself. That realization has to come down to the level of the common man.
This is the way the human organism is functioning too. Every cell is interested in its own survival. It knows in some way that its survival depends upon the survival of the cell that is next to it. It is for this reason that there is a sort of cooperation between the cells. That is how the whole organism can survive. It is not interested in utopias. It is not interested in wonderful spiritual ideas (I’m not against them). It is not interested in peace, bliss, beatitude, or anything. Its only interest is to survive. That is all it is interested in. The survival of a cell depends upon the survival of the cell next to it. And your survival and my survival depend upon the survival of our neighbor.
I am highly distracted by other philosophical issues at the moment, my brain is devoting maybe 5% of its normal functioning here to this response I am writing, so I appologise in advance for any misunderstanding of your meaning here, or any inability on my part to effectively communicate what I am trying to say.
Well that is your opinion, but that does not hold true across all people. I might consider an idea to be worth fighting and dying for, and who is to say I am ‘wrong’? You might think it is foolish of me to fight and perhaps die for my ideal of freedom, peace or love, but for myself I might think this is entirely a noble and great thing - it might be what I am called to do, what fulfills me, what makes me happy or is a part of my own process of self-actualisation.
We do what we do for many reasons. Causally they are no different from each other, so long as they motivate or determine further consequences and effects upon us. Beliefs, values, ideas are such causal factors for humans. It is a part of who we are. There is no use ignoring this fact - and I think, no use in demeaning it either, as it can be a wonderful thing, living in this rich world of human meaning and deep personal experience. I would take this human condition over a non-human condition without thought or meaning or purpose, even if our thoughts/meanings/purposes are often irrational, harmful or false. . . . it is not so much about the content of these thoughts/meanings/purposes, it is more about the journey, the flow through them, the pathways we take - who we are, and what our thoughts and values tell us about who we are.
It isnt about being perfect or right all the time - we can and should make mistakes. We each have our own process of self-discovery and self-actualising, our own needs and impulses and desires. Someone’s might not be yours - in fact they will not be, everyone has unique internal content which cannot be directly shared, and this is a good thing. So when you judge other people for putting value into their ideas, for finding meaning in the thoughts that they have, you are not just ignoring the fact that this is entirely unavoidable, but you are also failing to see how you yourself place your own value and importance on your own thoughts, even if they are thoughts about how much you despise thoughts.
We live in a world if ideas - we live inside our heads, each of us occupying a separate universe. Perceptions, words, concepts, ideas, beliefs, feelings - these are the substance of our internal universe. There is no getting around this fact, it is what we are as human beings. . . . it is how we experience, how we live. It is a part of the human condition.
What would life without thought be like?
I am not advocating life without thought, and I am not sure if you are either, but it seems that you wish to look at the detrimental effects of thought without realising that thought is A) unavoidably a part of human experience, and B) very good thing in terms of our survival, health, happiness and self-actualisation. We can make mistakes with our thoughts, and they can harm us or mislead us - but they can also elevate us, enlighten us, make us into better people and better societies. And of course, without thought we would all die in the span of days, likely. Knowledge is not immediately given to us upon simple perception, we have to interpret it, we have to understand what we sense around us. Thinking is how we do this. If you are truly advocating a survival-based viewpoint here, how can you ignore the primary role that thought has in assisting and allowing for our own survival, as individuals and as a species?
Unfortunately, due to some defect in Man’s thinking, there is conflict in the world. I see it simply as variance between groups of peoples that are born and raised in different cultural environments that believe their way is the solution. The solution for what? The solution that will bring all Man to a way of thinking and living worthy of acclaim and there is nobility and greatness in the ideas that compel them. But the individual life of each person is an extraordinary thing already. Nature has created you and me and we are extraordinary creations uniquely endowed. Living together side by side in cooperation is not a goal to me. Not a solution. It is the ever present reality of natural affairs. Disparity among nations as well is not a thing to be considered as threatening but rather beautiful in the sense that it gives flavor and expression to the world. Nevertheless, there are those who resist not in conforming to a singular way of life and are in accord with the idea that all must live a life that is maintained by the imposition of that way.
A much nobler deed indeed would be to come to the knowledge of that which produces discord and abolish it before it even arrives at the battle field. That would involve looking into thought and its fascist side. Sometimes myopic thinking can only cause problems but cannot be used to solve the problems.
The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when we attempt to use, censor, and control those thoughts to get something that our problems begin
Knowledge needs justification, belief doesn’t.
So back to imperfect everything… We can get close, and close enough for general muddling through, but it remains “close counts”.