I have a lot of opinions about the role that money should play in our society, and have found that they can be classed under three basic headings. Here are my three perspectives on the topic: they are listed as "good", "neutral", and "evil", in each case with this word roughly corresponding to a measure of money's purpose and value in the world. The truth lies somewhere amid these three assessments, I suspect.
The Good Perspective
"Money is the medium of the Sacred Exchange: a web of interactions which binds all of humanity together through mutually beneficial trade. It does not belong to one person, any more than the blood in your body belongs to one finger; it is meant to flow freely throughout society, going wherever it is needed and never tarrying long enough to grow stagnant and become a force of obstruction. When you need money, you should gain it; when you have more than you need, pass the surplus along. Pointless greed is a disease of the mind; learn to evaluate the difference between 'want' and 'have use for', so that you are not tempted to acquire things you won't appreciate simply for the sake of acquisition. Become a valued customer of many businesses, and possibly the good proprietor of one or two of your own; the social networking, not the money, is the objective in either case."
The Neutral Perspective
"Money is an abstraction, a temporary substitute forced on us by reality which we need to make use of, but we should never mistake it for being desireable, any more than a bandage substitutes for unbroken skin. The energy that we spend on trying to get money would be better set on trying to become immune to the need for it; permanent solutions to problems are worth investing a little effort, time, and even money in, but stopgaps are much less so. Never mistake the presence of a full bank account for true stability; the only way you've actually won the game of life is if you can give all your cash away to charity and still be okay for the rest of your life without a dollar to your name."
The Evil Perspective
"Money is totally a drug - you can't get enough of it, it artificially makes you feel good even when your life is otherwise going straight to shit, and you start suffering the moment you run out. The only difference is that heroin and the like have the decency to kill you when you overdose - those who gain an unreasonable amount of money and spend it way too fast remain trapped in their mockery of happiness and keep plunging down the moral slip-slide in search of still more."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Don't Be a Fair-Weather Friend
Many times have I been informed that some procedure at my workplace would not be changed in my favor because it "wouldn't be fair". Of course I was opposed to this at first just out of sheer self-centeredness, but as is my fashion I also thought deeply through the reasons behind my reaction, attempting to discover a motivation beyond mere selfishness, since I have good reason to suspect I'm usually not that shallow. And sure enough, what began as my sour grapes at being so denied has grown into a revelation about what I believe is necessary to create a better world.
According to Wikipedia, "The just-world fallacy refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault."
Anyone who has not long since learned that life isn't fair quite simply isn't paying attention. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people and vice versa at least as often as anything seemingly deserved happens, and yet we continue to cling to this screamingly nonsensical notion that life is just and fair. (Wishing it WAS just or fair is perfectly fine; it is only refusing to accept the obvious fact that it ISN'T that I have a problem with, and more especially insisting on setting policy on the basis of this delusion.)
Not only do I personally oppose the doctrine of fairness, but I outright declaim it as being responsible for a good fifth of all human misery. Since it takes resources we don't have to elevate all people to the utmost of happiness, any attempt to be fair can functionally consist only of spitefully dragging everyone down to the same level of misery. It is the absolute antithesis of what the world needs in order to grow beyond its failings. Any attempt to enforce fairness on the world can only consist of spreading the contagion of unhappiness like a man with ebola flinging gouts of his own infectious blood at everyone he can reach to make sure he doesn't die alone.
Stop accepting the inevitability of evil. Stop blaming the victims of life's fundamentally mean-spirited nature, no matter how much you may think they had it coming. Stop accepting that anyone who is in power deserves to be, that authority figures deserve your trust just because you've always trusted them before. We can solve these problems, but not until we stop pretending they'll solve themselves because everything works out in the end. It doesn't, it never has, and it never will. Luck is arbitrary, justice is imaginary, and things aren't going to take care of themselves. If we want the world to work in a fashion that we consider right, we have to make that happen, not claim it's already happening. And until that transformation is completed, cosmos-wide and right down to the most fundamental law of physics, so that all problems generate their own solutions and everything balances out in a fashion that pleases us, until then we will continue to be trapped in a galaxy-wide quagmire of injustice that only gets more dangerous when we fail to acknowledge its presence. (You'll find that very few things do otherwise, come to think of it.)
LIFE ISN'T FAIR. Accept it, and start thinking about better ways of dealing with that fact. Otherwise, you're part of the problem. Nothing could be more unfair than imposing your personal, biased definition of fairness on someone else. Ditch the entire concept from your vocabulary and start trying to do what's RIGHT, not simply what's equitable. That is the only way life will ever improve.
According to Wikipedia, "The just-world fallacy refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault."
Anyone who has not long since learned that life isn't fair quite simply isn't paying attention. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people and vice versa at least as often as anything seemingly deserved happens, and yet we continue to cling to this screamingly nonsensical notion that life is just and fair. (Wishing it WAS just or fair is perfectly fine; it is only refusing to accept the obvious fact that it ISN'T that I have a problem with, and more especially insisting on setting policy on the basis of this delusion.)
Not only do I personally oppose the doctrine of fairness, but I outright declaim it as being responsible for a good fifth of all human misery. Since it takes resources we don't have to elevate all people to the utmost of happiness, any attempt to be fair can functionally consist only of spitefully dragging everyone down to the same level of misery. It is the absolute antithesis of what the world needs in order to grow beyond its failings. Any attempt to enforce fairness on the world can only consist of spreading the contagion of unhappiness like a man with ebola flinging gouts of his own infectious blood at everyone he can reach to make sure he doesn't die alone.
Stop accepting the inevitability of evil. Stop blaming the victims of life's fundamentally mean-spirited nature, no matter how much you may think they had it coming. Stop accepting that anyone who is in power deserves to be, that authority figures deserve your trust just because you've always trusted them before. We can solve these problems, but not until we stop pretending they'll solve themselves because everything works out in the end. It doesn't, it never has, and it never will. Luck is arbitrary, justice is imaginary, and things aren't going to take care of themselves. If we want the world to work in a fashion that we consider right, we have to make that happen, not claim it's already happening. And until that transformation is completed, cosmos-wide and right down to the most fundamental law of physics, so that all problems generate their own solutions and everything balances out in a fashion that pleases us, until then we will continue to be trapped in a galaxy-wide quagmire of injustice that only gets more dangerous when we fail to acknowledge its presence. (You'll find that very few things do otherwise, come to think of it.)
LIFE ISN'T FAIR. Accept it, and start thinking about better ways of dealing with that fact. Otherwise, you're part of the problem. Nothing could be more unfair than imposing your personal, biased definition of fairness on someone else. Ditch the entire concept from your vocabulary and start trying to do what's RIGHT, not simply what's equitable. That is the only way life will ever improve.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Those Wonderful Parasites?
My mind went recently to a number of retro video games that I was once highly addicted to; it's been a long time since I felt like playing much of many computer games, but I still miss those days, they seem to have involved a more continuous, though less deeply satisfying, degree of happiness in my life, whereas working for a living and being indolent during my free time has lead to both more personal productivity and spiritual satisfaction, as well as more boredom and bleak despair. The games I was flashing back to included the fighting game "Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport" (a Mortal Kombat-type game with alien characters), the combat strategy game "Dark Legions" (a more sophisticated relative of the NES classic Archon as well as a direct competitor that lost out to the original Warcraft), and the more strategic (though it still has a combat element, it's mostly about resource management) game "Deadlock: Planetary Conquest".
The reason I bring this up is that I had an interesting thought about one of the seven alien races (well, six plus humans, but one of the reasons I like Deadlock is that it actually treats humans as being just as weird as the aliens, rather than being the default from which they all diverge) is a species evolved from tree-worms known as the Uva Mosk. They're one of my two favorites in the game*, a little of which has to do with the fact that they generate tons of natural resources and thus are fairly easy to play (but not too easy, a descriptor fitting my least favorite races), but mostly it's because of why they get more resources than anyone else. The idea is that, having evolved from parasites who subsisted off immense plants which were their entire world, when they became intelligent they extended their opinion of The Tree to encompass The Planet, and then other planets when they achieved spaceflight. So they have this really interesting philosophy about how all sentient lifeforms are parasites on their planets, and have an obligation to care for their health.
All this is blog material because it points out some of the problems with the English language as it's currently understood by American culture. You see, in our common-sense definition, the word "parasite" is almost invariably taken as a negative; the idea of the Uva Mosk therefore "swims upstream" in our collective consciousness, because they aren't really parasites if they care for the planets they "infect". There is a proper term for lifeforms that subsist harmlessly off their host, commensal, and another term for those who actively help the host survive, symbiote. However, "commensal" is not a term which has ever really entered common use, and most of the social mainstream has never heard it, while "symbiote" is almost as obscure and is often misused in chatter to mean "something which takes over your body", due probably to its careless use by certain early sci-fi writers whose influential reach perhaps exceeded their talent. (I haven't researched the issue so I apologize if this is a misconstrual of what seems to be the word's current understanding and my speculation as to its origin.)
Thusly, "symbiote" may seem like a more sinister word than "parasite", and the latter may be used to describe beneficient leeches like the Uva Mosk, even though by the strictest definition something can't be rightly called a parasite unless its presence is a net negative for the host. I'm even guilty of this linguistic drift myself; wanting to reach that wider audience, I've written my philosophies to use "parasite" imprecisely in a fashion that people might be able to "grok" even if it's technically wrong, rather than disorient them with a less familiar word like "symbiote" or a completely obscure one like "commensal".
There's a lesson in all this, part of which is just that Americans in general and myself in particular are lazy bastards, but also hopefully some of it pertains to the ease with which linguistic drift occurs, and that we should beware of its effects.
* For any fellow goobers who wondered, the Cyth are my other favorite, with the Re'Lu a distant third and humans fourth, the Tarth being the ones that bore me the most and the Ch'Cht being marginally preferable to the Maug. My reasons for these preferences are many but both of the top slots are based primarily on what I regard as "pure cool factor", being a little more intellectual in the Uva Mosk's case while the Cyth benefit from the basic factors that almost invariably make villains cool, them being the most nearly objectively evil of the races even if they do have something resembling a reason for what they do. And even if they aren't evil, they're definitely "dark" and so tap into the same awesomeness factors as Darth Vader, Sauron, The Kurgan, Warcraft III's Undead, and so forth.
The reason I bring this up is that I had an interesting thought about one of the seven alien races (well, six plus humans, but one of the reasons I like Deadlock is that it actually treats humans as being just as weird as the aliens, rather than being the default from which they all diverge) is a species evolved from tree-worms known as the Uva Mosk. They're one of my two favorites in the game*, a little of which has to do with the fact that they generate tons of natural resources and thus are fairly easy to play (but not too easy, a descriptor fitting my least favorite races), but mostly it's because of why they get more resources than anyone else. The idea is that, having evolved from parasites who subsisted off immense plants which were their entire world, when they became intelligent they extended their opinion of The Tree to encompass The Planet, and then other planets when they achieved spaceflight. So they have this really interesting philosophy about how all sentient lifeforms are parasites on their planets, and have an obligation to care for their health.
All this is blog material because it points out some of the problems with the English language as it's currently understood by American culture. You see, in our common-sense definition, the word "parasite" is almost invariably taken as a negative; the idea of the Uva Mosk therefore "swims upstream" in our collective consciousness, because they aren't really parasites if they care for the planets they "infect". There is a proper term for lifeforms that subsist harmlessly off their host, commensal, and another term for those who actively help the host survive, symbiote. However, "commensal" is not a term which has ever really entered common use, and most of the social mainstream has never heard it, while "symbiote" is almost as obscure and is often misused in chatter to mean "something which takes over your body", due probably to its careless use by certain early sci-fi writers whose influential reach perhaps exceeded their talent. (I haven't researched the issue so I apologize if this is a misconstrual of what seems to be the word's current understanding and my speculation as to its origin.)
Thusly, "symbiote" may seem like a more sinister word than "parasite", and the latter may be used to describe beneficient leeches like the Uva Mosk, even though by the strictest definition something can't be rightly called a parasite unless its presence is a net negative for the host. I'm even guilty of this linguistic drift myself; wanting to reach that wider audience, I've written my philosophies to use "parasite" imprecisely in a fashion that people might be able to "grok" even if it's technically wrong, rather than disorient them with a less familiar word like "symbiote" or a completely obscure one like "commensal".
There's a lesson in all this, part of which is just that Americans in general and myself in particular are lazy bastards, but also hopefully some of it pertains to the ease with which linguistic drift occurs, and that we should beware of its effects.
* For any fellow goobers who wondered, the Cyth are my other favorite, with the Re'Lu a distant third and humans fourth, the Tarth being the ones that bore me the most and the Ch'Cht being marginally preferable to the Maug. My reasons for these preferences are many but both of the top slots are based primarily on what I regard as "pure cool factor", being a little more intellectual in the Uva Mosk's case while the Cyth benefit from the basic factors that almost invariably make villains cool, them being the most nearly objectively evil of the races even if they do have something resembling a reason for what they do. And even if they aren't evil, they're definitely "dark" and so tap into the same awesomeness factors as Darth Vader, Sauron, The Kurgan, Warcraft III's Undead, and so forth.
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