How can there be ‘have-mores’ when they are not taking it from the ‘have-less’s’
The laws of thermodynamics dictate that when energies are appropriated more in one region another region is impoverished.
A unity, a creature, a phenomenon is an ephemeral appropriation of energies.
Life is such an appropriation; a self-contained system attempting to digest the universe, by ordering it, piece by piece, within itself.
When I eat, I deny life to another.
When I take up space, I deny it to another.
When I breathe, I deny it to another.
When I covet power, I deny it to another.
To seek a balance is to seek an end.
To dream of paradise is to dream of belonging to an inert system characterized by uniformity and unchanging, un-distinct, harmony.
Shit, I’ve been breathing all day. The death toll must be astounding. Tell me, Satyr, given an average lung capacity, how many poeple have I denied life to in 48 years?
The fact that air is plentiful enough to sustain us all, for the moment, makes the reality of it unrecognizable.
But if I place you in a submarine with a limited supply of oxygen with a hundred other fellow human beings and a few plants and animals, then you’ll realize how competitive and antagonistic a single breath can be.
I’ve listened to pseudo-compassionate, western Christians lament the plight of the third-world for years.
All the while they fill-up their SUV’s and eat their 5 course meals in fancy restaurants, and heat their 4 bedroom homes and buy luxurious gadgets and material symbols of their ‘happiness’ not even recognizing how each of these acts contribute to the very plight they pretend to be concerned about and to which they offer their loose-change, during extravagant social displays, as a way to deal with the contradiction between their cultural ideals concerning their altruism and spirituality and the reality of their life as gluttonous, selfish, living, breathing organisms.
Perhaps the next time you wolf down a pizza you can think about the resources and energy that went into producing it and how it was cultivated from an Earth with finite capital in a universe with finite (if we are to believe physicists) energy.
Oh my, how compassionate and caring you all are.
I’m impressed.
Oh how we weep for the downtrodden and suffering, talking about the ideals of caring and sharing and loving not even noticing how we contribute to the very things we pretend to despise by simply existing.
We all want our neighbors to be just as content as we are, just so that we aren’t reminded daily of our privileged, hungry selfishness, and we become blind to how against our own ideal we are.
But let our neighbor never exceed our own contentment.
His well-being must always remain beneath our own so that our caring and compassion can offer us the feeling of superiority and benevolence.
The fundamental function of a collectivity is to reinforce and maintain each others beliefs and ideals even while each individual contradicts them with their actions.
It’s what makes your sarcasm even more amusing.
It’s like listening to a ‘Liberal’, bleeding-heart, pacifist cry out against the war in Iraq and then watch him get into his 4 cylinder vehicle to drive to the corner for some milk.
We all want to help other just as long as it doesn’t involve too much giving-up for us.
Words and little donations to the cause make us feel special and human and nice, but let nobody threatened our basic standard of living and the things we take for granted.
Then our compassion turns to anger and righteous violence. We send armies of stupid young men to kill and die for our comforts and then put ideals and morality to hide the needful, fearful gluttony of it all.
How nice is it to be that delusional and hypocritical? It saves one from one’s self.
Now I don’t know about anyone else but when I eat and breathe and take and want I don’t pretend it’s for the others good.
I know it’s only for my own.
Africa became impoverished due to colonialism and the acceptance of its ideaology by persons who could have survived without it.
In America the Amish I know of do not require much technology in order to survive. They survive well because their communities support individuals. American Natives survived well before the lies of manifest destiny and that they were savages were imposed on them. Nowadays, the young bucks on the reservation stay drunk. Blacks built our cities. Chinese built or railroads. Poor whites worked our mines. Poor Irish built our maufacturing systems. For what? For the final recognition that they were considered substandard humans?
The robber barons in America considered the maintenance of their lifestyles as far more important than the lives of any workers who guaranteed their having such lifestyles. Child labor and 12 hr work days insured this.The fact that unions trying to estabilish living wages and safe working conditions were considered illegal or unAmerican futher indicates that morality in the U.S. has historically been based on who gets the goods and who is deemed unworthy of having them.
Morality starts at home.
Ierrellus - I can come closer to agreeing with what you say here than I could previously. I think my main objection to the “usual” view is that there is one and only one cause for poverty in the world. In fact, there are many.
Morality in the US has been close to what you describe. It’s our Christian heritage.
Yes.
The very idea of selflessness alludes to non-existence.
I am self-less means I diminish self.
But how can there be parity in anything?
Even if we create a society of minimal disparity we still have enough of it remaining to still talk about the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’.
If I have one penny more than you I can be considered rich under certain conditions.
To imagine perfect parity is to imagine an absolute state of inert harmony.
No progress, no movement, no change.
But I am talking about degrees not absolutes. Because if I can be accused of using absolutes to create arguments then the entire argument about wealth parity is based on an absolute ideal of equality and justice and harmony, as well.
This universe knows no absolute parity in anything.
Differences are what the flux is.
Differences are what causes evolution.
The entire idea of life depends on appropriating and hording energy.
Physical form is the hording of energy as matter. I deny this space and matter to any other and call it mine and me. My every act is an taking.
When I consume I take from another and make it mine.
When I move I take up space and deny it to another.
When I give I take self-respect and authority.
We ignore this only when resources and space seem infinite.
When it becomes finite we, all of a sudden, see how the very act of existing is an act of aggression.
Even when I give I either gain in equal or unequal amount- depending on my strength and status and understanding, or I invest in a future gain.
The very people who, seemingly, weep over the poor and the innocent victims, live lifestyles that create economic disparity and victimization.
In part, it also alludes to not existing forever, recognizing value in identities apart from the self, and compassion.
I don’t need perfect parity; peace would be sufficient for today. The things we need fulfilled, as someone else put it, are in terms of life, not lifestyle, although clearly the two coincide, we have yet to give everyone enough food or clean water, so we ought to focus on necessity at present. Furthermore, this is mostly in terms of economics and the direct results thereof; there could still be progress, movement, and change in other respects. Do we need rich and poor to have a philosophy forum?
You don’t think selflessness really exists except as an impossible absolute, correct?
This is why I think your idea of self as an absolute is incoherent. There is no absolute dividing line between you and me except in name and word.
“this has to be seen in the context that everyone on this board is immensely wealthy compared to most of the population of the world.”
I absolutely love this observation because I see it so often missed in other conversations.
It brings me to a debate I was interested in a while back. The Bill Gates foundation to me is in the perfect direction- a world leader in computers turned leader humanitarian. One project is to distribute crank-powered laptops for kids all across the third-world population, combined with a global program to make internet access automatic. This could become a revolution on the internet almost as big as the revolution of internet itself. The debate is that the priority should be food before computers. I’m with the former.
What I find most interesting about debates on poverty is that they are so often referred to in a static way. That is: “them the poor” and “us the wealthy.” When really, empires have flourished into gluttons and then plundered into wastelands. Modern military shows just how terrified we are of how quickly the tides can change.
As doomsday as this may sound, I think it comes down to oil and the next few decades. I warn you, I’m about to sound very depressing . . . I believe the adults of most wealthy countries are going to grow old seeing a sudden depression in a decline of technology (no more oil- no more computers, cheap transportation, cheap heat, cheap manufacturing . . .). And there will be a sudden revolution in human nature becoming more socialist, combined with an enormous global death toll much less region-specific. One scientist who took it very seriously but undiplomatically- the unabomber.
If the Bill Gates foundation builds the infrastructure for automatic internet access, it’ll build the infrastucture for food too, although I doubt it will do either all on its own, and I guess I agree that the priorities are a bit odd–I’d bet it’s more of a mix between a gimick and a use of Microsoft’s leverage on that particular branch of society.
I think losing oil will change a lot, but not in the way of your doomsday-esque prediction. We’ve got technologies that are developing to replace gasoline, so the real difference will be, I think, diverse innovative markets from those, and a much smaller reliance on the Middle East. While this will disrupt the status quo there, I also think it could help the region in the long run.
Compassion is the self identifying with the whole or the other.
It is a product of weakness, made necessary by unification which diminishes individuality to the extent that assimilation is required.
The larger the unity the more diminishment of self is required and it replaces it with a greater Self.
This upward mobility of unities is what produces complicated life-forms.
But, of course we need haves and have-nots to have a philosophy forum.
Firstly we need the haves and have-nots of knowledge and insight which causes debate.
Then we need the haves and have-nots to inspire the conflict and competition which results in the technology to have an internet and the leisure time to engage in abstract contemplation.
Peace, my dear friend, would mean an end to progress in any area.
Where there is no threat, no need, there is no struggle to overcome.
Competition in all areas is what pushes us to evolve.
The hypocrisy, I perceive, is that all of you contribute to this competition and conflict which causes disparity and progress and yet you pretend, to yourselves and to others supporting each others moral and ideal self-opinions in the process, that you are interested in the plight of the weak and suffering.
Words and simple donations are not enough. They are smokescreens the mind uses to distract itself from its own contradiction of its own moral system and ideals.
The very fact that you own a computer and the means to work it and maintain it and the time to enjoy it means you are using energies that exceed your biological needs.
By doing so you are preventing another from using these energies for himself, often not meeting his basic biological needs.
Then, on Sunday, you offer the excess of your resources to alleviate the guilt, derived through your Judeo-Christian idealizations of altruism and selflessness in which you’ve been indoctrinated from an early age, to pretend, to yourself, that you are a ‘good’ person and an unselfish one.
All the while your lifestyle is one of excess and you take for granted the things you now associate with basic needs for your well-being within the context of your western environment.
There is no absolute, period. We aspire towards absoluteness.
What separates us is consciousness.
We are manifestations of the same thing but with distinct, isolating, negating, discriminating boundaries.
We do away with these and we cease being individuals.
I am me because I am not you.
We are self in the process of becoming. Which direction we choose to take in this becoming (which ideal) and what talents and strengths and weaknesses we possess towards this end creates our identity.
If there were no need for this differentiation and all was the same then there would be no life at all.
We can agree that we are all rooted in the same soil but not that we’ve grown and nourished from it in the same ways.
To say half the world is poor is pure nonsense. It would mean that half the world is rich or the other half is made up of the rich and also the almost rich or middle class, making the poor a majority.
Logicaly there is only a small percentage of the rich and a small percentage of the poor. peroid.
After all being rich or poor is simply a state and is relative to other things such as living costs etc. And besides, everyone has something that everyone else needs, whether spiritual, economical or otherwise.Everyone is needy and lives in want. Ultimately everyone is poor most especially the rich…
faust,
Good point well considered. There are many factors indeed. Christianity in America may perhaps be the most virulent. If America was founded on Judeo-Christan beliefs, as religious fundamentalists now claim, most of the claimants would object to both. Our founding fathers were, in the majority, deists. When Tom Jefferson wrote “we hold these truths to be divinely inspired”, Franklin revised it to say “self-evident”.
During slavery, where did mainline churches stand? Only the Quakers opposed it. A few years ago the Methodist Church offered an apology to American Natives. A bit late, don’t you think? But then the Quakers took it upon themselves to educate the natives into being white folks, cut their hair, taught them the Bible, all under government sanction.
The biggest lie to gain popularity in America was the Horatio Alger philosophy–that anyone can rise from rags to riches, that one must pull, himself up by his own bootstraps. There is much in this philosophy about the rugged individualism of pioneers. But what happens when the pioneer spirit is eclipsed by overpopulation on a small planet? When genetic differences among personal abilities keep some from realizing the dream?
It is easy to blame have-nots for their condition. It’s the same as saying a rape victim somehow deserved or caused the crime against her.
Speaking about Bill Gates turning into humantarian. It may mean Bill Gates would become the next Aristotle. Or may even become a philosopher king as Plato puts it.
Gates wants to teach people how to fish, not just feed them. Education even the barest minimum can help.
And for the poster that said it the duty of the wealthy to give their money away? Piffle. Its their money, I sure don’t want someone coming and telling me I have to give up my money. Lets ask ourselves this one question ; If you were a multibillionaire. Just how much would you give up? Just remember you lose your principal and start mucking around with your money there will be taxes and conmen floating around. That money is mostly on paper and is not easy to liquidate. You have to realize that most wealth is invested into other people and making other people a living. So it looks real good on paper and of course you get to play more but, if you think about a multibillionaire giving everything away, there will be a lot more unemployed people.
It is true for a rich man were to give everything then his workers would be unemployed. The rich should just invest in the poor countries so more people can be employed.
I think we have solve the issue.
But, to do that the rich would have to unemploy in their home countries first. Although heavens knows that sweat factorys are owned by the wealthy world wide.Problem not solved.
