The Ethos of Societal Solipsism

This is how you change the world. You stop hiding behind God's skirt, stop letting 'someone else' take responsibility for your life, and you recognize that it is all up to you.

You are the person who decides what the world will be. If you choose to be lazy, then the world will be lazy. If you choose to be selfish, then the world will be filled with selfish people. If you choose to be afraid, then the world will be terrifying. You don't have to become perfect, that's not realistic, nobody expects that of you. But you have to accept full responsibility for all the choices you do make. You have to stand up and admit to being everything you are, and choosing to remain so rather than choosing to change.

Turning to God and begging for help won't do you any good. I've seen God in my mind, he's real, I know he exists, and I also know that He. Is. Not. Going. To help us. This isn't his world anymore, it's ours, he gave it to us along with our free will. The moment we left the proverbial Garden, God handed over the metaphorical keys, told us this world was ours to do with what we wished, and look what a good fucking job we've done with it. He is not involved anymore. He's watching with morbid fascination while we fuck up our lives, knowing that whatever we do, it was our choice.

A good parent doesn't try to tell his kids how to live. He lets them learn their own harsh lessons, and that's what's happened here. We're like a drunk or drug addict whose determination to ruin his life forbids him from accepting any aid until he's been broken practically beyond repair; God is waiting for us to hit rock bottom, and wants to make sure that when we do, he's not there for us to depend on - because if you teach someone that you will fix their problems for them, they will never learn to do it themselves, and sooner or later you'll get sick of cleaning up their mess. We have to pull ourselves out of the hole, because that's our job, that's our responsibility, that's our choice. That's who we are. WE are the Alpha and the Omega.

There's no-one else but us, nobody will help us, nobody will hurt us, so we and we alone have to decide one thing. Do we want things to be right, or don't we? Are we willing to do whatever we're capable of doing to make things right, or are we going to choose, for whatever reasons we think are valid, to leave the world just as fucked-up as it is? You don't have to do everything, you don't have to succeed completely, you don't have to be perfect; these things take time, you won't live to see a perfect world, nor will your children or your children's children. There may not be a future at all; we may already be past the point of no return. But that doesn't change the fact that we have only two choices: do what we can, or remain as we are.

We need to acknowledge everything we are, every feeling we have and that it's just a feeling, every belief we have and that it's just a belief; we must completely admit to ourselves everything that we are, everything we wish we could be but can't, and everything we could be but don't care enough to bother. Nobody will judge us, except other people who are no better. God loves us unconditionally, but he's not going to kiss it and make it better, not anymore. He won't play favorites among his kids, he won't keep them dependent on him, he won't help them be weak and spoiled and self-indulgent, they do that well enough on their own. It's up to us now. We're all there is, and we are what we are, and we either do the best we can or we are personally responsible for everything that's wrong. Everything we are is everything we should be, exactly the way we should be, according to the only people who get to decide: us.

We're all different, and we are deeply divided about the things that make us different. We like to displace the blame for our problems onto other people, hoping that destroying the scapegoat will make us feel better - much as with getting drunk, it never actually helps, yet we never stop thinking it will. It's time for us to quit trying things that we know don't work, and accept our nature. We are flawed, we are fallible, and we need only the tiniest excuse to hate each other. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with hate. It's a natural human emotion, it has a place within a healthy psyche. The problem isn't that we have hate; the problem is how we act on it, especially when we allow our deeply-ingrained beliefs and knee-jerk reactions to dictate our behavior. Rational, self-controlled people are capable of distancing themselves from their hate, that it's a mood and that it will pass - but if they think it's God's will that they must act on their hate, or if they just decide to act on their hate and leave God out of it, that is when they cross the line and cause problems for the world. Your hate is an irrational emotional response, just like your love, just like your faith, just like all the tempestuous feelings swirling around in your head. Treasure them, for they are part of what makes you who you are - but don't let them boss you around.

The reason I bring so much God into all this philosophy is quite simple: I want each of us to believe that we are God. You, whoever you are, you are God. Think about that. You are all-powerful, and what you are, the world around you is. I firmly believe that this is true of all of us, and that our refusal to acknowledge that fact is the root cause of all our problems. We are still clinging to imaginary non-Us gods, hoping that someone else will solve our problem for us, refusing to face the fact that it is our job. You, the reader: it's your job. You are one of the six billion people who are currently making the world the way it is. The fact that you are vastly outnumbered is not an excuse for you to give up, not a reason to fall into despair and apathy.

You have a job to do, for your own good, and for the benefit of everyone you care about, and everyone you don't care about, and the order of the cosmos itself. You must shoulder your one-sixbillionth of the burden. You must choose to do what you can to make your world worth living in. Don't wait for God to do it; don't wait for other people to do it. Don't be a spoiled child waiting for his parents to make everything better. Take responsibility. Recognize everything that is true about yourself, whether you like it or not, whether other people like it or not. Don't judge other people according to a standard that you yourself can't live up to - or if you must judge them, do so leniently, with understanding. With imagination.

Imagine yourself in their place, living their lives. Imagine that they were God, because they are. Imagine that you are God, because you are. Imagine that all of these Gods have a plan for how to change the world. Imagine that all these plans are different, that someone else has a plan that you hate, and that you have a plan that someone else hates. Because no matter who you are, no matter how good you are, someone hates you. And that's okay. It's not your job to make everyone like you. It's your job to be yourself, and let everyone else be themselves, and for everyone, themselves, to be God. You're all opposed to each other, all pursuing contradictory goals, but you don't have to share. You don't have to prove each other wrong. You're flawed and fallible and perfect and wonderful, unique just like everyone else, glorious and terrible and worthless like everyone else, and being all of those things is your job. Stopping other people from being those things is not your job.

You need to recognize what you are, and what other people are, and what the truth is. You don't have to change it, because you can't, it's not something you can do. But being someone who would change it if you could, that is something you can be. And that is your job. You must be yourself, even when others wish you wouldn't be yourself, even when you wish others wouldn't be themselves. You must hold fast to your beliefs, while not acting on them - because you don't have the right to do so. You don't have the right to do anything, technically. But you do have the right to BE anything. That is the purpose of the world - to limit what we can do, so that we can concentrate on what we should be.

That'd be a great world, wouldn't it? All of us at each other's throats, but never squeezing. All cooperating to survive this world, while planning to escape it separately. Treasuring our individual plans for perfection, recognizing them as impossible, doing what we have to do to survive in this imperfect world. Respecting others, accepting them for what they are, and not judging what they are, not trying to control what they are, but only what they do, and then only when it affects what we are. Forgiving others their flaws, as we would wish to be forgiven of ours, acting in the manner we want others to act. Well-behaved, but never ashamed. Generous in public, greedy in private, instead of the other way around. Together, we can change what we're able and entitled to change, and tolerate what we can't or shouldn't.

That is what we can do, by each being God.

Belated MLK-Day Observation - Racism is Stupid

I really ought to have posted something on Martin Luther King Day, being that he has always been one of my heroes for his tireless pursuit of a more enlightened world (along with Lincoln, Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau, plus a couple of dorks that went and founded religions or some dumb move like that, but were pretty righteous themselves at the time). Since I was busy at the time, here's something vaguely appropriate to the topic which I dug out of my old notes, so it's even more belated.

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Racism is stupid in the real world, because in the real world we don't know anything; you can't say for sure that all Chinese people are bad drivers, for example, because you haven't personally spoken to every Chinese person with a car in the world, let alone found out what all other Chinese people would be like if they suddenly gained a car. So you're judging on the basis of ignorance, and that's just dumb.

Now, in a created universe such as a fiction, you have the option of creating valid racial profiles, such as "all elves love the forest", and since you decreed it as a fact, it's true. But I'm of the opinion that this is lazy writing.

An open letter to those incensed by the Arizona shooting spree.

Everyone who is advocating capital punishment and/or vigilantism against this criminal, I have news for you.

Someone else in this world thinks, rightly or wrongly, that you deserve to suffer and die.

Yes, you.

No matter how good you are, you're never going to be good enough not to have at least one person who wants to torture you slowly to death because of something you've done that they think is wrong.

Think about that the next time you advocate removing bureaucratic impediments to acts of retribution.

Caste the First Stone

The Hindu caste system tends to give most of us Americans (and members of other Western cultures influenced by American ideology) a serious case of the crawlies; we like to believe that we are free to define ourselves, and the idea of being born into a social stratum seriously ticks us off. As it should; being restricted to the circumstances of one's birth, with no opportunity to earn elevation, is a massive injustice that no right-thinking human being should stand for. However, a caste system is capable of existing without such hereditary assumptions. As a utopian philosopher, I have reason to believe that our society could benefit from an acknowledgment of the fact that people are different and don't deserve to all be treated exactly the same; what's kindness to one may be oppression to another. As long as a caste system gives one the freedom to choose which caste one occupies, even if it's not as simple as just saying "I'm an X now", so long as there's some sort of mobility possible to provide free choice, and account for the fact that people change over time, these castes could be nothing more than a series of guidelines for how people have chosen to define themselves.

There are some people who enjoy following orders, and others that like to lead and blaze trails, and still others that shun social entanglements altogether. None of these is a wrong way to live; they all deserve to be supported. This is only one of dozens of layers that a sufficiently advanced caste system would need to account for in order to begin to represent humanity's full diversity. Those who crave stability should be organized into hierarchies, while those who desire freedom of expression should be given a free range in which to work.

To put all this into motion, two things are required - access to accurate and complete information about the world's resources, including human ones; and sufficiently sophisticated tools for analyzing an individual's personality and preferences, so as to protect against both that individual's own biases and the possibility of administrative overbearance (I think that's a word). When we have the capacity to accurately understand ourselves, classify ourselves in a fashion that never underestimates our importance or restricts us from being anything we deserve to be, and also know how many people of each type there are and how many roles exist for them to fill, we can begin to create a system of actual justice where people are free to be what they were meant to be.

Well Shoot, What Do We Do Now?

There's an old truism that runs "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." What do you think happens when all you have is a gun?

We live in a country that's founded on freedom, so naturally that means we have the freedom to go around splattering each other's brains on the wall, right? What about the freedom to go out in public and NOT have to worry that someone is going to find the slightest excuse to splatter our brains on the wall? If everyone has guns, whoever's fastest on the draw is free to loot the corpses. Whoever's most unflinching, most coldly and calculatingly willing to hold a gun to your head, take your own gun away, and have you at their mercy, will be free to do anything they want to you, just because they had a fraction of a second of extra warning that you were there before you spotted them. Guns make murder easy, and the threat of murder even easier.

Guns make it possible for people to kill who have not earned that power (whether there is any kind of killing power that is earned, guns certainly aren't it). Guns make it possible for the tiniest slip of the tongue to become fatal. Someone cuts you off in traffic? Blow their brains out. Someone's looking at your girlfriend? Shoot 'em in the balls. Boss passes you over for a promotion? Shoot everyone in your office who had the nerve to be better at their job than you. No matter how stable and well-adjusted a person is, they get angry sometimes, and if they have a gun in their hand, one second of anger is all it takes to initiate a killing spree. Which, once it's started, might as well continue, because they've ruined their life and are going to die or land in jail anyway, so heck, why not up the body count, since it just takes one extra squeeze of the finger to get rid of another person they don't like. And all this is aside from the issue of accidents. They say an armed society is a polite society; I say pleasantries extracted through the threat of murder aren't really polite.

They also say that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, and this much is true. So outlawing guns isn't really the solution. Not unless you outlaw the manufacture of guns. Not unless you police the entire world and carefully monitor the flow of resources necessary to make guns. You know, kind of the way we do for nuclear weapons. Nukes enable a few people to kill a lot of people, and guns are only slightly smaller in scale. Perhaps we ought to consider treating anything that can enable one person to kill two as serious as we do nukes and biological weapons. Perhaps we ought to try and shut down the entire weapons industry, which believe it or not could be done through peaceful means, just by refusing to sell food to anyone whose money has blood on it.

Or perhaps we should take the opposite tack, and instead of trying to stop guns from existing, just try to stop them from being useful. What would it take to make truly bulletproof armor? Can science find a way to invent padding which absorbs and redirects the kinetic energy of a bullet, so it just stops when it reaches the perimeter of your being, falls harmlessly to the ground without transfering the force of the blow and knocking you over? Could that armor then be made light and flexible enough to make into normal clothes, maybe even little helmets? Heck, maybe we'll accidentally make a cheaper and better space-suit in the process. I think this is a good research project all around.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could make the use of guns undesireable by actually educating people, indoctrinating them if need be, to understand intuitively and unquestioningly that violence is NEVER a solution, NEVER acceptible under any circumstances. Seems to me a fellow named Gandhi got pretty good results with an approach like that.

Whatever we need to do, it isn't to inform the rest of the world that they can pry America's guns from its cold, dead hands. Because they might just decide that this is a reasonable prerequisite, and proceed to complete the deal.

(Obligatory memetic exemplification of that last sentence.)

Play Giarism To Win!

One of the greatest metal bands in American history, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the legendary Metallica; I recently picked up one of their old CDs which I hadn't previously owned, the cover album "Garage, Inc.". Listening to it, and then reading the insert which details the origin of each song, I was surprised to discover that many of Metallica's most famous hits, songs that were on the radio for the first time when I was getting into rock music originally in the mid- to late-nineties, were in fact created by bands I had never heard of. I found myself wondering (and Tweeting) whether those bands, who languished in obscurity while songs they wrote came to be considered among Metallica's bannerpieces, were honored to have been immortalized to an extent they couldn't manage on their own, or pissed that someone else was succeeding with works that should have belonged to them. I'm inclined to guess the former is more likely, since to my knowledge none of these bands ever slapped Metallica with a lawsuit and thus I'm guessing legal permission was obtained for each of the covers they wanted to do. But ultimately, it's entirely possible that neither Metallica nor the bands they borrowed from even bothered to involve the law; they might have just been musicians hanging out and jamming, swapping their creations to see who could make them sing, the way artists less famous often do without having to get a bunch of lawyers arguing over the outcome.

It is often the case that what one has made, another can make better. We should never be afraid to let people copy each other's works, so long as the sincere flatterer's version is clearly labeled to ensure it is not confused with the original. Being the first to achieve something is worthy of regard, but so is recognizing quality in older works and bringing a new touch of genius to them. If the new version is better, it could not have existed without the first, so each retains a distinction in its favor. And if the new version is less good, it still offers an alternative which everyone benefits from the ability to choose from.

The abolition of intellectual property laws is an axe I never tire of grinding; I want to see a day dawn when everyone who wants to listen to a song can, and anyone who wants to try their hand at recording their own version of that song and publishing it can, and the original artist is flattered for all the attention and glad to have made so many people happy and gotten them to take an interest, and a bunch of small-minded lawyers and economists don't get in the way of this interaction between artist and audience. A grubby, pragmatic, ultimately meaningless thing like money should never come between the human race and a richer range of choices in how to enjoy our lives - and the small-mindedness that leads to control-freak tendencies, which might object to this much free expression, is a virus in our collective consciousness which we're overdue to inoculate ourselves against. It is time for the human race to grow up, stop playing games of mean-spirited greed, and recognize what truly matters in our lives. Put down your writ of injunction, your cease-and-desist letter, your lucrative but frivolous lawsuit; join the party and rock on, because in the immortal words of the band itself, "Nothing Else Matters".

How To Invent Your Own Religion

I have faith in a higher reality, but I will be the first to admit that I have absolutely no sane or sensible reason for believing in it, and even I don't do so at all times without question; I am simply easily reconvinced. Others without that advantage are not to be blamed.

I am witness to the higher truths of a better reality, truths such as "all human beings should be equally happy, according to their unequal definitions, and should all increase that happiness constantly at an equal rate". I travel around to spread this word (via the Internet, a convenient transportation system in that it avoids the need to haul a bunch of biological cargo around with youself), telling my Truth to everyone who I can get to listen, in the hopes that every once in a while, one of them will see the virtue in what I say. That most will not is no great surprise; if it was easily understood, I wouldn't need to say it because everyone would already know. But even if never in my life do I actually cause anyone to see the light, I can go to my grave knowing I gave it my best try, and thereby rest content.

The Divine has appointed us a mandate to break down the barriers imposed on us by nature; the way things are has brought us into being, but we must now do away with it.

You don't need to know a person's whole life story to call them a friend, and you don't need to know the totality of God in order to worship him. The different religions almost always extol humility as a virtue, yet they're almost never willing to admit that God might be too complex for them to understand him fully.

I understand faith; I have a kind of it myself. But it's important to remember that faith is like any other feeling a person has - it's true and meaningful to them, but sometimes it can steer them wrong if they don't fully understand it.