The ancient Greeks, credited inventors of Democracy, had no term which translates perfectly to what we know as duty. Yet they gave great emphasis to logos. So, it comes across as though what we today regard as duty did not jive with their thoughts on Democracy or logic.
Plato’s story of shadows on the wall showed the importance of seeing a thing for what it is rather than its presentation or what it is declared to be. There is a distinct correlation between this and what can be observed from the Aristotelian Law of Excluded Middle, where a proposition is true or is its negation, with no befuddlement or compromise. Something is real or it is not. Either we are true to ourselves, or we are not. A need is a thing backed by reason; we need food, we need healthcare, or we cease to exist. A want is declaration for something unjustifiable by reason; we want to live better than our neighbors, we want to fuck our neighbors, or we must settle for being what/where/who we are. In this respect, duty to those who need it can be measurably justified as it regards something beyond the subjectivity for how we might feel. A want is unreal, a thing not yet to be, so duty to those who simply want it is appeasing desires, undemocratic and illogical as opposed to objective reality for good or ill. Our society instead defines persons by their needs only in a derogatory manner, while defining persons by their ambitions always in a positive lighting. People in glass houses should be extremely cautious about masturbating. Everyone should practice what they preach to choirs or better.
If there’s sacred geometry then there must be profane geometry which would be the original theory to counter the representation theory because everything begins with a fuck given. I suppose I over-rely on circular logic to some degree, but if time is a flat circle then there’s no reason to not see where I’m coming from. But if the goal of life is to be made to look and feel as dead as humanly possible until we are actually deceased, then my years of no sleep but sacrifice would have been endless foreplay to that end. If the mind lingers for any time after death it will come to me as a waking dream, and if the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a birth canal I will fucking cry kicking and screaming. My convictions and principles mean too much to me to ever allow my support of what I might see as evil. Even would it mean supporting the lesser of evils, I won’t oblige it and I will never rationalize it. I conduct my life accordingly, having learned firsthand of the insurmountable strength which comes of it. The only people who can abandon hope are the idiots entertaining the notion to begin with.
Learning everything the hard way, the older I grow the more extreme my measures taken to assure nobody anywhere might ever even remotely be in a position to take either credit or blame for anything I do or say. I obsess over discovering non-conflicting ideological foundations, what follows is beyond me.
Not only did Balzac understand this where concerns the importance of equality in romantic relationships two centuries ago by both earning and depleting his love, but through his fiction he conveyed how it applied to every possible interpersonal relationship contained within societal structure. Contrasted with ego abounding today. I have nothing to be thankful for, which is all the more cause for myself to manifest reasons for others. If love were to be real, its purpose must be to create heaven for those who need it. And to deny heaven for those who simply want it, lest love lose itself. Love given freely is invitation to not deserve it, like spoiled, rotten children pushing their boundaries as Trump is doing through his administration. Whereas hatred given freely is an invitation *to* deserve it, the hate, like the battered spouse who finally fights back, stooping to a lower level with lethal force. I’d be fine with all celebration and holidays scrapped except for our birthdays. Everything else is unnecessary bullshit social pressure, largely for-profit. Fuck the time and energy wasted getting together with those we’d rather not. Peace needs to come naturally or it’s short-lived illusion.
I would wager that with less distractions we would solve more problems, and that it’s unlikely happenstance for this being the way things run today, empowering pointless, self-ingratiating creative opinion with more gravitas and hero-worship than visceral solutions. Nobody wants measurable authenticity anymore than they want responsibilities, at least not those online. Maybe it’s a conscious decision for some but most clearly prefer distraction to seeing it themselves. As with orthodox religions defined by whatever afterlife, this fake microverse frees us from accountability. Maybe, instead of perpetually giving government a light scrub behind the ears while thinking we’ve not enough gated communities, news bubbles, echo chambers and safe spaces, we could cool it with new social networks and startup a new government, with these existing socials getting the scrub. If these subjugating socials aren’t segregating comfort zones well enough, then perhaps online tech just can’t compete with what’s offered by Oprah’s book of the month club or Klan rallies. And, if those extremes are out of the question then we must wonder at why we value proxies/avatars over IRL.
What if the anonymous safety net of centrism is merely the act of rationalizing degrees, and by extension the exceptions, to a supremacist mindset? I mean, could or should a rape victim ever be sold on believing theirs was merely a partial violation, or might good be good and bad be bad, with middle-ground reserved only for those who fancy chaffing themselves sitting atop fences? I don’t think the world is as complicated as we make it out to be. It’s the exemptions, the back-doors and get out of jail free cards muddying the waters. Granting allowances undoes society. With this societal lacking, we shouldn’t reasonably expect it but it’s the thing to strive for nonetheless, made difficult by roundly mistaking want for need and need for want, and the insistence on good and evil being subjective pending circumstances. And heads in the clouds we can be oblivious to when a footnote of our lives effects so many so dramatically. I don’t think we should fully ostracize anybody, because we all are works in progress, but I also think we should not be too quick to praise anybody. As Wilde said about saints and sinners.
In early ’18 I had my jawbone disconnected for oral surgery, to dig out the arced root of a broken wisdom tooth. Paid for by landscaping for the surgeon’s office and home for a calendar year. Legally he could have lost his license over that. But I brought a berry patch and veggie garden both back to life, turned an old burn pile into a flower garden and made an elaborate stone walkway out of creek rock, raising his property value and leading to paid gigs from his neighbors. As well as the cell number for one of his nurses. A writer despising paper trails, I survive by decidedly not living beyond my means. When I was among the ever-migrating homeless, there was quite a lot of bartering and trading in fullest effect. We do not need this society of Capitalism to get what we need, only what we think we want. It’s difficult to profiteer folks arguing on behalf of their liberties, but oh so easy for folks arguing on behalf of their entertainment. I don’t think utopia could or should have a Hollywood. Branding is only more divisiveness, everyone wanting to believe problems are caused by a bad capitalism which a fabled good capitalism will magically save. As foretold by the prophets of the beltway. Starving cancer cells do devour themselves, but only to keep the greater mass of cancer alive, not to stop the cancer.
After all, property really is theft. Kindle famously deleted paid-for files and yet there’s debtors imprisoning for those unable to meet eternal payments of purchased goods, which can be repossessed. The largest companies regularly spend almost as much on out of court settlements as on PR, manufacturing demand whole-cloth to meet pre-ordained goods/services rather than versa vice. Freedom of choice is purposefully limited to enrich select profiteers, empowering monopolies as status quo regardless of antitrust laws or ethics. There’s no real choice in this culture of mental codependency, told if Republicans/Democrats do not represent the public then something is wrong with the public. For all those incapable of filling their own personal voids, what of this culturally-systemic infrastructure, technological and ideological, warrants duty in its favor?