And not only in psychology but also in terms of biology, ontology and logic and all forms of systems. Our human insights and experiences and concepts of good and bad develop from this deeper level of meaning. What meaning? That reality, life, truth, being are inherently ‘good’. Does that mean bad things don’t happen? Of course not. Or we can even understand how bad things and imperfections, errors, and random accidents are a part of reality and perhaps even a necessary part of it. Yet the statement still holds: reality, life, truth, being are inherently good.
Do you know what this means? What I mean is, do you understand what this statement is really getting at? What is the underlying meaning of those words?
I am convinced very few people understand this, and philosophers especially are clueless. Over-cognizing at the expense of intuition and more emotional-level insights will cause blindness here. Use a balance of both approaches to override the toxic ego effects, as much as you can without creating even more problems. So let’s dive in and explore the meaning of this meaning, namely what is written as the title of this topic.
Violence is psychologically anti-structural
Structure is created content, substance and form, what exists; physicality and immateriality, the substantial as well as the metaphysical; that which has been organized into dependency relationships with other things sufficiently similar enough to itself to be capable of acting as extensions and new parts-pathways for flows of energy, content, movement, meaning, possibilities. If reality were only tiny blips of energy blinking on and off at some quantum level then nothing else would exist, obviously I would not exist to be writing this and you would not exist to read it. So more does exist beyond smaller or even smallest levels. We know this is necessarily true just as we know “why something and rather not nothing?” is a philosophical question with a baked-in dishonesty insofar as it fails to acknowledge the necessary or inescapable fact that something DOES exist and therefore it would be impossible to fully conceptualize the idea of nothing existing. No matter how much you negate, you cannot negate everything. Even if you negate “everything” you still are left with both the negator himself/herself and the negating-itself as a process.
What is substance, what is structure? It is everything. All around you in all its various and many tectonic forms and layers of relations. The nature of structure is to exist. What does that mean? It means structure IS this 'nature of existing-ness-as-such" whatever and however that might mean in any given instance or situation. Solidity is one way to view it, but structures also take on semi-solid and un-solid forms too. Solidity can transcend simple forms of solidness. What matters is the enduring nature of the thing(s) that are existing and their being constructed and BEING in such a way as to continue to further this enduring nature. Philosophers call this things like will to life or will to power, I try not to use those terms since they are metaphorical or image-based and not entirely accurate. You could say the enduring nature of structures is like something that is attempting to “will more power to itself”, yet to understand whether or not and to what extent that is true as a comparison would first require you to understand the direct truth I am attempting to explain in this topic. So let’s leave metaphors and images and those sort of comparative analogies aside. We don’t yet have the means by which to evaluate whether or not those are accurate or false analogies. And in fact analogizing is often used in philosophy and probably elsewhere too as a way to circumvent more accurate pathways to understanding, I believe as a means of venting out ego-excesses via inertial entropic holes or errors in our own mental structures. A failure of proper convergence across key boundaries. But that’s probably a different topic.
We now see what is good, in terms of structure and existence, existing things/beings. What is bad? Bad is anything that harms, hurts, destroys or causes problems and errors in structures. Whatever impedes or retards or warps growth that would otherwise have occurred. Trauma, pain and suffering, extreme and negative emotions, ignorance that has become toxic and embedded as an aspect of one’s personality (as opposed to a more pure ignorance which can be good, depending on certain other factors); loss, confusion, unpredictability (again all things being equal here), destruction and loss of self/life/potential. Anything that cuts down goodness. As we know that good = structure now, we can see that “bad” is anything that has a destructive effect on anything good.
Bad often materializes as errors in the systems, as imperfect structures or dysfunctions within structures that leads to failures of systems to operate as they should be operating. That’s not only a moral claim but rather and more importantly here simply a claim of logic and ontology. If a car is driving down the road and suddenly a bolt falls out of the engine, because that bolt was made from improper materials, and this causes the oil to spill out of the engine which then causes several moments later the pistons to seize up and the engine to stop working as it simultaneously heats up and then ignites the gasoline and explodes, that is… bad. No one can argue against the fact that this is bad with respect to the car itself. You might say cars have no feelings or preferences either way, and that is true from a conscious perspective. But structures have logical sets of operations and parameters in-built which are key and necessary to those structures themselves. The broken bolt would be, objectively speaking, a violence against the structure of the car. Violence is anything that causes harm, and harm can also be understood as breakdown, collapse, destruction of any kind.
What about the destruction of bad things? Maybe the violence that occurs to bring down an evil political regime or to stop a would-be murderer are good? Yes from a higher perspective that can certainly be the proper evaluation, yet it does not belie the fact that the violence itself is bad in terms of its anti-structural effect on the given structures themselves. We need not evaluate those structures in order to understand this at the basic level. Evaluation comes later and would be best saved for when we have the necessary grasp on the basics, in order to avoid introducing or feeding-outletting our own errors.
The proper life would be one without violence, although we know that is nearly impossible. Yet its impossibility does not militate against the truth of the claim, merely against the likelihood of its actualization. Maybe this reality or our portion of it is still quite young and underdeveloped, maybe a lot more time is needed for perfections to be achievable (for errors to be properly worked out and fully purged over time). For now, we can at least understand these principles in a psychological way that is both objective-philosophical-logical and personal-subjective-immediate. Understanding these truths will naturally begin to edify your own structures, since we can also understand that reality = truth = good. Errors, bads, harms are merely the limitations and failures and dysfunctions, the persisting imperfections in our systems.
Tell Carleas. Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.