Another path of becoming

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the world
as it is… the usual troubles abound… wars,
people very unhappy with the way things are,
and that unhappiness is found within the many
types of escapes that people have… from
addictions, to the captivation of sports…

(I would suggest that the consumption of sports
is more a reflection of the discontentment with the
world than with the sports themselves…the fascination with
sports is simply an attempt to avoid the real world
and I say this as a lifelong sports watcher and participant in
sports)

the ‘‘real world’’ is a rather painful thing… both to watch and to
be within… it is, as the Buddha has suggested, full of suffering
and despair… one grows old, gets diseases, watch family
and friends die… the moments of happiness, true happiness
are rare and far in between… but the vast majority of life is
found within the boredom of existence… which has its own
problems… for most of us, we get up, we shower and go to work,
where we spend, most of us anyway, the next 8 hours… we
get home, exhausted and in hopes of forgetting… thus we turn on
television and lose ourselves in mindless sitcoms and, watching
sports…no thinking involved… and for many, we also distract with
drugs and booze… there is a reason why pain pills are so popular…

but think about this… we are so busy trying to distract
ourselves from our unhappy world, that we forget that
we can influence, impact the world… but that takes hard
work and dedication that most people don’t want to try…
but it also requires something else… an idea of what
we want the world to look like… ok, this world sucks,
what should the world look like to suck less… what
would it take to make the world a better place?

the conservatives, the right has stated, publicly,
that it is liberals and their ''WOKE"" that has created the
world’s problems… and several has called for the deaths
of liberals… or at the very least, prison for them…
and liberals just want conservatives to tone down
their extremism…and both sides fail because there
is no sense of what we should be aiming for… what should
the world look like? what are we actually working for?

One could say, we should have less war… OK, but
how? what can we do, exactly do, that will reduce
war in the world today?

the fact is that wars have been around as long as there
have been human beings…are wars inherent within
human beings? One might say that violence is
inherited within human beings, but that attitude
allows us to escape responsibility for our actions…

if we are unable to control our instincts, and violence
is an instinct, then we are nothing more than animals…
operating on instincts with no control over those instincts…
that is a working definition of animals… creatures
that have no control over their instincts… and if
we have no control over our instincts, then we are nothing
better than animals… but the path to becoming human is
nothing more than the path to overcoming our instincts…
the journey to becoming human is simply the journey
is to act without instinct… the further away from instinct
we get, the more human we become… given
the amount of violence and war in the world today,
we are locked into instinct… thus locked into being
animal… the path to becoming human begins with
the rejection of violence and war… and it is the
peacemakers that are the most human… Gandhi
and MLK are two examples of people who have rejected
animal instincts and have made peace the primary goal
of being human… which is to say, they have further
the path of becoming human… and we build statues
and name streets after them… as we should…for
they have pointed the path to a world that we want
to have… every single act of violence, be it from the
state or the individual, is an act of instinct, of being
animal… and we must reject that act of violence,
no matter who the actor is, the state or the individual…

thus, the glorification of war, the glorification of sacrifice
that is popular in America today, must be rejected…
Wartime presidents are not to be given glory,
but attacked for not making peace the highest priority…
but Kropotkin, we must be able to defend ourselves,
both collectively, the state and individually…
the justification to defending oneself, allows us
to practice much violence onto others… the justification
of defending ourselves after 9/11, brought us to two
completely unnecessary and idiotic wars that only
brought benefits to the American military-industrial complex…
no one else benefited from those two wars…
just as the Vietnam War didn’t bring any benefits to
anyone outside of the military-industrial complex…
or can you or anyone for that matter, offer up a
defense of the Vietnam War and its benefits to
America, for example? Over 55,000 thousand Americans
died in Vietnam war and for what? You tell me…
and what benefits did Americans get from either the Iraqi
or the Afghanistan war of 2001?

Wars and violence are just two aspects of being animals,
not being human… this question of needs and wants
and desires play a role in this… which is our next post…

Kropotkin

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as advertised, the next post…

we look at three particular aspects of being human/animal,
that of needs, wants and desires…

We are animal in the needs we have… we must have food,
water, shelter, health care, education… that is true of all
animals, of all living beings…the basics needs of survival…

we don’t in fact have any use for wants or desires…
we do have needs that must be fulfilled… but our desires
and wants, not so much… these are things outside of,
beyond our basic needs that must be fulfilled…
as part of my own basic survival, do I need a bed?
do I need a car or a TV? my kitchen table or my couch?
No, not one of those things are necessary for my own
survival… I can live without a couch or a TV or a kitchen table…
and I can survive without my 5000 books, but I would be pretty
dam unhappy… but I would survive…

those items not directly related to my own survival,
the couch or the TV or the books, are really just
desires, wants…I am a lot more comfortable with my
couch… if nothing else, to take my naps…
the problem with human beings is that we mix up
our basic survival needs with our own wants and desires…
to survive, I don’t actually need a car, but a car sure helps
me reach my wants and desires… instincts are really
just biological in nature… we are born with them…
but they can be overcome… but we cannot overcome
our need for food, or water or health care or shelter or air…
but is a couch a need or is it a want, a desire?
we already know the answer to this…
violence is instinctual… we know this… and we can
overcome our instincts… we can say no to violence…
we can say no to war, we can hold to peace… against instincts…
and we can overcome our wants and desires… I want a
56 inch TV… But why would I want/desire that?
the word here is ego… much of what we do as human
beings is driven by ego…which is beyond/outside of
our needs… Keeping up with the Jones, is our ego
at work… they buy a new car, I buy a fancier newer
car, they buy a two bedroom house, I buy a 4 bedroom house…
and this ego, often drives our natural instincts… especially
of violence and war… Putin invades the Ukraine…
of necessity, or of need? nope…he invades of ego…
it is part of the desires or wants, but not of actual
needs… his life and the life of Russia will go on without
the Ukraine… he doesn’t need it for Russia to have its
basic need met… and we have such a thing as collective
ego… and the collective ego of Russia was such that
most people approved of the invasion… it wasn’t needed,
but it was wanted, and it was desired…
and it played into the instincts of the people, which
is violence…War is violence… collective violence…
and wars like Vietnam were popular until they weren’t…
because it wasn’t necessary for the survival of the
people of America…it was ego driven by wants
and desires…

but how does an unpopular war keep going? through
isms like nationalism and patriotism… to denounce the
Vietnam war or to denounce the Iraqi war was called
unpatriotic… anti-American…and people have a
need to be part of the group… that is part of everyone
psychological need… to belong is basic to everyone…
and if you denounce the war, you are not wanted,
you no longer belong to, or part of the group…
and that is part of all human beings basic
psychological needs… the need for love, to belong,
for safety/security, to be esteemed… are all basic
human psychological needs…just like eating, sleeping,
water, shelter are basic biological needs…we have
psychological needs… and we ignore them at our
own peril… and we ignore the impact of ego on our
own wants, desires and needs at our own peril…

ask yourself, am I acting from my needs, survival,
or am I acting from ego, want, desire?
and the problem here is the failure of people to
be honest with themselves… the failure to
follow the Socratic motto… first, to know thyself,
and the second, the unexamined life isn’t worth living…

a failure to examine what we truly hope for, desire, want
and have as actual biological/psychological needs…
and what role is our ego playing in our hopes, desires,
want and needs?

but for every person to examine this also suggests that
we need to engage in a collective examination of our
desires, goals, wants and hopes… what future do we
want and how much of that want is ego driven,
instinctual? and how much is actually part of who we are?
what is ego driven and what is the part of the path into
becoming human? both individually and collectively…

Thus we must examine our superstitions, our prejudices,
our myths and our goals… we will continue to spin our
wheels as people and as a society/state until we begin
to examine what it means to be human…

there will be and there cannot be any progress as individuals
or as a society/state until we examine who we are…

Kropotkin

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Many animals get violent, though there are exceptions to that, species level exceptions: bonoboes, sloths, manatees and quokkas are some intelligent mammals (one marsupial) that are very rarely aggressive. And much of the intra-species aggression between animals is demonstrative/performative and stops short of killing. Then there are species that mainly get violent in defense against predators.

But war is obviously a human endeavor. You need to have complicated cognitive ideas to fuel a war. You need ideas like nations, honor, possibly racism, perhaps religions or isms to justify the war. You need to invest time and technology and money into making weapons and organizing and supporting the war.

I mean, sure wars are often stupid and fueled by things that make them terrible options. The idiotic wars after 9/11 not only cost lives and incredible sums of money that could have helped people, they also included the massive privitization of the military and intelligence. That’s rarely talked about.

But these wars are particularly human and distinguished in many ways from animal violence. Apart from the fact that there are animals species that don’t come anywhere near human aggression and violence levels.

You’ve managed with this animal vs. human schema you have to insult your political opponents by essentiallly calling them animals - which by the way is a propaganda tool frequently used to justify violence against other humans. And then with the schema insulted animals.

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…And there was war in heaven.

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I don’t think they fully rejected their instincts, especially MLK, but they were both devout men. So does thisnot play a part in being human?

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Did you miss the thread where he talked about how religious people are more like animals and in the same post mentions three or four very human, as opposed to animal, people: two of them were MLK and Ghandi. This was pointed out to him as very odd - and also the really terrible history of us/them comparisons where the ‘them’ are compared to animals. But, it’s still going on in his schema, though here more implicit. The irony in all this seems to escape him. It’s hard to come up with any historical figure in the 20th century who could be considered more centered on their religion than these two. And they both connected their compassion and approaches directly to their religions. There communcation generally had a spiritual/religious edge.

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Wouldn’t you agree that it’s time to let go of concepts that divide us? Nationalities, religions, and socioeconomic status are just a few examples. Recognizing the interconnectedness of all – humans, nature, and the cosmos – is crucial to transforming the reality of the world we live in.

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Modern secular western society is largely a result of the Enlightenment and the emergence of science as the new language of public truth— language that has no need for the God hypothesis. As a result, religion was privatized, and it was reduced to a matter of personal opinion and personal preference that should be kept out of the public realm. A personcan be privately religious, but public life should be kept secular.

Enter Gandhi with three themes of spirituality: Brahmacharia, Satyagraha, and Ahimsa. The first is the practice of self sacrifice and self discipline. This results in the second soul force—the power of truth. The third is nonviolence. As soon as truth needs violence to protect it, it has become a lie. Live in such a way that it is oneself rather than others who will be asked to suffer. By returning love for hate, non-violence for violence, one seeks to reach the conscience and awaken the humanity of one’s opponent. Soul force freed India from colonial rule and inspired progress in civil rights for minorities in America after 100 years of a apartheid preceded by slavery.

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