Many apologies to Ancient Greeks and Christians, but the physical world has no order that pertains to living the good life, and humans are rare beings who delight in order living on the fringes of near universal chaos. We briefly exist, and this existence is chiefly comprised of encoded moleculecular chains constructing a machine and the machine organizes it's environment to suit the specifications of the machine.
There is no palliative for this crushing truth that in terms of the material universe we are worthless machines, as disposable as any other thing existing. A strange equality arises from that. Why do the rich get more if they're not more valuable? Why do the powerful have power?
Valuation is an inescapable part of being human, barring the perfectly enlightened of course, and as such we have many flimsy excuses for inequality. Essentially excuses to allow the machine around us, our community and society, to act out the irrational impulses of people who value. And we are all irrational.
The trick for the equal democratic society is to minimize those flimsy excuses that make the machine inequitable. We've attempted to vanquish religion as a justification, now let's eliminate the claim that the rich are better than the rest. That they've 'worked harder' is a common American saying. If they have worked harder they equally happened upon the ability to work hard, in the same way a person who is lazy has happened upon the circumstances that make him lazy.
Reward hard work because that's what makes the capitalist machine move, but don't let it become a justification for daylight robbery. We create value - value doesn't exist without valuer - and as such let's value what is conducive to human happiness and not what is conducive to suffering.
There is no palliative for this crushing truth that in terms of the material universe we are worthless machines, as disposable as any other thing existing. A strange equality arises from that. Why do the rich get more if they're not more valuable? Why do the powerful have power?
Valuation is an inescapable part of being human, barring the perfectly enlightened of course, and as such we have many flimsy excuses for inequality. Essentially excuses to allow the machine around us, our community and society, to act out the irrational impulses of people who value. And we are all irrational.
The trick for the equal democratic society is to minimize those flimsy excuses that make the machine inequitable. We've attempted to vanquish religion as a justification, now let's eliminate the claim that the rich are better than the rest. That they've 'worked harder' is a common American saying. If they have worked harder they equally happened upon the ability to work hard, in the same way a person who is lazy has happened upon the circumstances that make him lazy.
Reward hard work because that's what makes the capitalist machine move, but don't let it become a justification for daylight robbery. We create value - value doesn't exist without valuer - and as such let's value what is conducive to human happiness and not what is conducive to suffering.
This post went in a direction that I was not expecting, given the beginning part.
ReplyDeleteMaybe, I'm just dealing with semantics here (though semantics have an important role to play in discussion), but I would not exactly venture to say that we are worthless machines, for it is an unnecessary normative valuation - the universe does not give value/worth whether negative or positive. Whether or not we are worthless machines, your argument still stands.
It's fair, though perhaps not as helpful to your argument, to say that we are as disposable as any other thing, because it's somewhat vague in its application; it could be 1) comparative in saying that, whether we disposable or indispensable, we are equally so to other existing things or 2) normative in saying that all things are equally disposable (and therefore no things are indispensable). The difference, I suppose, is that disposable can be a neutral valuation, while worthless is a negative valuation.
I like the main idea though: since we cannot make reference to objective value, we are all, as far as we can tell, equally objectively valuable, and must therefore decide upon our own subjective value - it's entirely in our hands. We need to recognize that value is in our hands, but also in the hands of others. I don't know if I said anything useful.