Morality

[Aidon]

The favorite topic of every liberal, Judeo-Christian, idealist, nihilist, in short Modern, in our time.

The first thing to do is define the word, as it is encoded in human books…

Online Dictionary wrote:
mor·al
[mawr-uhl, mor-]
adjective
1.
of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: moral attitudes.
2.
expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work.
3.
founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom: moral obligations.
4.
capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct: a moral being.
5.
conforming to the rules of right conduct (opposed to immoral ): a moral man.

A repeating term “right”, suggesting the “wrong”.
The terms have no meaning outside human preferences, inclinations, hopes, fears, ideals; objectively, that is.
Subjectively it can have any definition the dichotomies of “right/wrong” suggest but never illuminate.

The first thing to note is a general understanding of words, and language.
In this case the word/symbol refers to a category, a manmade category, pertaining to a behavior.
The behavior is indifferent to the manmade category, because the human word is a human tool, and not a universal truth.
The behavior is a social behavior, and indicated a particular kind of behavior which is only possible within social organizations, pertaining to social species.
The behavior involves a risk taking, a cost undertaken with no foreseeable, and/or obvious, benefit.

Humans, having studied the behavior have reached a hypothesis.
It relates to blood ties, identities forged within groupings, and an altruism based on ensuring a return for a cost - an investment, to put it in economic terms.
The investment grows in time, and after repeated stresses, building what we call trust.

All of this, of course, originally happens on an intuitive, subconscious, level; a behavior promoted through natural selection methods, producing a particular demeanor, personality trait.
The behavior becomes innate, part of a species psyche, an automatic response to stimuli.
No thinking required, beyond the superficial, reactive, instinctive.

The fact that this word refers to a human construct, which then refers to a phenomenon, makes it malleable, as all words are.
A word can be detached from the phenomenon, gradually, and over time, making it a pure noetic symbol referring back to another human construct, or a human sensation, feeling, ambiguity.
This is the process of deification, purification…making of the word into a holy, spiritual symbol.

When detached it can then be defined in ways that contradict the original use, or slightly changing it to where it loses its original intent.
This is the nihilistic process.

Some other words where this process has advanced to a level where it can be discerned are the words…female/male…humanity…love…human…and, of course morality.
The slight alteration increases the scope of the original to where from an intuitive, genetic behavior, it becomes a learned, enforced, memetic one, and where the tribal ties built on trust and bloodlines become some vague universal ideal called humanity.

Now morality becomes institutionalized, enforced by using some absolute judgment of good/evil, and the threat/benefit of the eternal. The trust, mutual interests, genetic relationships, are morphed into some love for all…a thou shalt, under the penalty of a peer enforced penalty of shaming and exclusion and isolation, and genetic impotence - social castration.

[Aidon]

Like with everything human morality has a theoretical and a pragmatic face, corresponding to the ideal and the real.
The ideal is how things should be, in a perfect, totally human world; the real is how this theory applies in pragmatically despite the theoretical and ideal.

In nihilistic dogmas, moral systems, the ideal is so detached from the real, so unrealistic, that no man can ever meet its standards resulting in the shame and guilt, as a form of self-deprecation.

[Aidon]

Dawkins coined the term “selfish gene” to describe a set of behavioral traits that may not benefit the actor immediately but do benefit the actor’s genes, which make the actor act.
Plants can be said to exhibit moral behavior from a human point of view, but it is not moral behavior as there is no code no logos, no ‘thou shall not’.
What there is, is a selfishness where the other plant by sharing in the same genes is identified not as an otherness but as partially or completely Self.
The plant has no ability to discriminate visually. It relies on chemicals to discriminate, and when these chemicals (inter)act with its receptors (sense organs) it senses a similarity or a difference.

This advances in sophistication reaching the visual stage, where an organism is both mobile, unlike the pant, and also visual, managing to discern similarity/difference over longer distances.
Distance being in space, and space being possibility - the distance is the possible movement toward, and is temporal.
Action towards within an environment of known and unknown possibilities - cost/risk, the object/objective being the potential, not yet realized, benefit.

This shift in sensory medium create a shift in strategies and methods of evaluating good/bad, cost/benefit.

Cooperative social behavior is what makes morality, or moral behavior possible.
It also relates to time, over spatial possibilities.
Probability being the term which has evaluated the possible by using first-hand or second-hand, in man, experiences…in other words the past precedent.
With cooperation precedent is used. Precedent is called trust.
That the sun rises every morning makes me trust that it will so again this morning.
When another organism has helped me accomplish something I needed makes me trust in him/her doing so again.
Right there we see our probability evaluation rising, within an environment of unpredictable variables.
a comforting, comfortable, feeling.

Order, ordering/becoming, which is another way of saying organism, are emerging unities built on consistency, predictability.
They are attracted to it whenever they perceive it so as to become comfortable - to increase their level of comfort within the agon, the environment requiring vigilance, constant effort and so on.

The aesthetic appreciation is this perception of predictable consistency, comforting us.
It is why a particular distance form it is sometimes required.

In the case of a painting, where the chaos of the brush strokes, gives way to a simplification/generalization of forms, from a distance, where order is perceived.
In the case of a jungle, where the vibrant colors, the arrangement of trees, is enjoyed from a distance where the rotting flesh of dead carcasses the mosquitoes, the snake lying in wait are lost in the jumble/jungle.
The distance, detachment, offers the mind the potential to simplify/generalize sensual data losing the uncertainty, the chaos, the details, in the process.

In the case of cooperative behavior the other becomes this unknown, which slowly is known by its consistency and predictability…yet only from the comfortable distance of I/Other.
The other is simplified/generalized using its actions, is behavior to formulate a probability.
This increases comfort, trust.

Even if the other is dangerous to me I can trust that my evaluation of its method and behavior will be repeated.The trust is in my evaluation, built upon experience, precedent.

The other is always different…and similarity is then discovered in the other.
Not the other way around.
First there must be divergence before common ground is found…just as first comes consciousness, of otherness, before self-consciousness discovers self as another other…making Know Thyself a process of self discovery.

Morality begins not as a code, but as a trust.
I trust that you will help me rather than not help me or threaten me…nd in turn I will act in ways to increase your trust in me.
The possibility of a different option is always present.
This is called moral only by a mind raised in Judeo-Christian paradigms.
In nature there is no good/evil…there is only constructive/destructive…more beneficial less so, more costly less so.

The standard is time.

Why do I feel more inclined to help a gazelle drowning?
If the cost/benefit is positive, towards me, I ma more inclined to help because I can relate to the negative nature of existence.
I know the agon, I feel the need, and the anxiety/fear…I project myself and empathize.
I empathize with suffering, not so easily with pleasure, the latter might even make me suffer the pangs of envy, because suffering/stress is what I feel continuously to varying degrees.
The other now becomes an extension of me, from a distance…if I know nothing of it, its character, its past.
I see in it the order, and I want to preserve it…because I am ordering, and I am attracted by ordering.

If the distance is bridged and the particular organism is known to me, then precedent takes over.
If i dislike this particular organism then I may opt to watch it suffer, and feel pleasure in this, because now its ordering has come into conflict with mine, and mine always dominant.

[Aidon]

In the struggle between predator and prey, why, is it, that we mostly side with the prey?

It’s because we intuitively relate to the suffering, anxiety, stress, vulnerability, because we are it in relation to the vast expanse of possibilities, we call space/time.

It’s a matter of identifying.
Why does a mother defend its young with its life?
Because she identifies with the 50% of the genes in them.

Why does a man go off to die for an abstraction, an idea, a nation?
Because his identity is part of it, or attached to it.
For him he does not die, because he is the Idea, the Nation, and nothing else outside of that.

[Aidon]

Identification is another word for ego, self.

And this is what is called the “expansion” of the self, the greater Self, which can then reach the extent of an ALL, or a ONE.
In Modernity the smaller, organic, ego/self, is projected/exaggerated/inflated into an imagined hyperbole: the Nation, the Ideal, God, Humanity…
The smaller self is assimilated, devoured, immersed, buried, and it because the private personality/personae, the secret self, and in the forefront emerges the Character/Caricature of the public Self, in line with the cultural, moral, codes.
The smaller self is a delusion, it is shameful, primitive, little…the larger Self is liberating, eternal more real than real…it is the Idea(l) Platonic form of Self.

To sacrifice the smaller for the bigger becomes an easy transition from mortal to immortal, through the process of self-rejection, self-denouncement, self-hatred.
This process is called enlightenment…to be made light, as all ideas are light, airy, unburden by anything earthly, primal, natural…they are pure notion, holy spirit, detached and cleansed of anything vile and worldly.

[LaughingMan]

Human beings are so very moral hence all the war, killing, tyranny, inequality, exploitation, apathy, poverty, and all out slavery of every generation within civilization with an added bonus concerning lack of freedom or independence.

Doesn’t make any f*cking sense, does it?

Is this the best so called moral agents and actors can come up with? Sounds like a sick joke to me.

No, it very well does not make sense but for some reason the majority of the idiot population around the globe likes believing in this social fabric of mythological fancy because it looks good within appearances and it feels right professing.

So, let’s just stick our heads up our asses down to our back sides and just believe in morality while blindly ignoring the rest of the world along with all the human costs that it entails.

Just remember folks, when those people in authority piss down on your backside time and time again think about how they are fine distinguished moral representatives or arbitrers.