Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Do people want to be good?

People want to consider themselves good.

Most people aren't willing to take the trouble or make the effort to actually BE good.

Some people have as their motto, "I have to love myself before I can love anyone else."

Others say, "It's my job to take care of number one."

These two groups are overlapping sets.

I do not want to be good. I want to be narcissistic and I want to take care of myself first and foremost. But for me, that is not an option. When I was sixteen I took a course in Philosophy, a part of which focused on ethics. There I learned about altruism: "The good of the many outweighs the needs of the few." This also happens to be the Vulcan main principle. This simple statement struck me as eminently correct, and I adopted it as my slogan. Not, "What would Jesus do?" because I wasn't a Christian, but the notion that the right path to take was to consider myself not one whit more precious nor more important than anyone else. And if some action benefitted a dozen people and cost me everything, it was still the right thing to do.

Since I was a kid, though, the notion of right and wrong has been under constant attack. I suspect Prager doesn't know this, as he keeps referring to having your brain twisted in graduate school. He is naive. Every ninth-grade student has already been completely brainwashed that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and every human must make his moral code for himself. I'd like you to notice that I chose my moral code, but I did not fabricate it. It's one that has been around since the Greeks.

So, today, we have a whole crop of kids under 25 years of age who believe that whatever they do is right. They are mean, rude, nasty, insulting, even cruel and abusive, and have no clue that there is anything wrong with their behavior. They'll attack anyone and everyone who displays any sort of vulnerability, such as not playing a certain game as well as the bully does. And belittling someone for not being a top player is something they do every chance they get. They play their game in a constant swagger. Let some other player ask for information and that represents an opportunity to make mincemeat of him.

And very few people have the stomach to stand up to these vicious persons, and it's only rarely that the whole crowd will gang up on them and tell them to shut up and behave.

For the record, I want it to be known that my other favorite saying is, "Character is doing the right thing, even when it hurts you."

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