Good and evil are components of the one whole heart.
But what are these cogs in the moral machine? Evil, as I mention elsewhere, is a term of dismissal for what is inconceivable for ourselves, what we could never do or think or believe. Good, to hazard a guess, is what we invest our selves in, what we work at or value or, yes, believe. Our beliefs, after all, amount to a distinction between which actions or states we consider good, and which we consider evil(bad, wrong, not necessarily biblical); issues on which we are neutral have no component of belief to speak of, just knowledge.
It is not difficult to see how these two should be opposed, nor how they work together. The evil is the unknown, the alien and the Other, earth and the temptations of material reality; it is definitely not the good. The good has already been experienced, is known and comfortable and loved; it is definitely not a challenge.
This is what happens: we experience the unknown, and good battles evil. In doubt we find confusion, and lose our way, but if we persevere ignorance may always be conquered. Those faiths which vilify evil embrace the value that it has already been beaten by the wisdom of their particular faith, and now finds strength only in the hearts of unbelievers. Faiths which propose a balance or cycle of good and evil, on the other hand, express the view that learning is a continuing process, unpleasantly magical, and advise focusing on the magic.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Appleseed
If you never invest the effort to know how much work it takes to feed yourself, all you can really know is how much work it takes to buy food.
The work needed to grow food will be slightly reduced over time as skill grows, but will vary mainly with climate conditions; harder to farm in drought, easier when you've done it your whole life.
The work needed to buy food INCLUDES the work needed to grow it, as well as any other costs the food grower wishes to pass along. So if it is true that the efficiency of centralized production is passed on to everyone else as free time for other pursuits, the farmer should be paying less per meal he grows than we would each do on our own, and in turn each of us should be paying this same reduced price.
See, this is what actually justifies centralized agriculture, the idea that streamlining production means less work for everyone. But in a system which prescribes that the maximum amount possible be charged for any product or service, products and services become grossly overvalued just because of the amount of work needed to buy them.
It is the human influence on pricing, in other words, which sabotages the potential advantages of centralized production.
The work needed to grow food will be slightly reduced over time as skill grows, but will vary mainly with climate conditions; harder to farm in drought, easier when you've done it your whole life.
The work needed to buy food INCLUDES the work needed to grow it, as well as any other costs the food grower wishes to pass along. So if it is true that the efficiency of centralized production is passed on to everyone else as free time for other pursuits, the farmer should be paying less per meal he grows than we would each do on our own, and in turn each of us should be paying this same reduced price.
See, this is what actually justifies centralized agriculture, the idea that streamlining production means less work for everyone. But in a system which prescribes that the maximum amount possible be charged for any product or service, products and services become grossly overvalued just because of the amount of work needed to buy them.
It is the human influence on pricing, in other words, which sabotages the potential advantages of centralized production.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Resourcefulness
What we're looking for isn't a way to deal with the whole of the natural world, which after all we've already dominated rather successfully, but rather a way to deal with humans in particular.
Further, we would like to accomplish this without changing the way we deal with the world as a whole because, again, the exploitation of available resources whenever possible has been a very successful strategy for producing wonderful results, physical feats of human will unmatchable by any human body.
But as humans increase in number, we become much more of a factor in our own environments; the natural world as a whole is populated more by humans, and so in dealing with the natural world we are dealing with humans much more often than we have to when smaller population densities are the norm. Put another way, as more resources are tied up in sustaining human lives, human lives occupy a greater share of the pool of resources available to our species.
Where we encounter conflict is in attempting to manage our human-form resources the way we do resources in other forms. People don't like being treated the way people like treating things, and with enough people to deal with this starts to really, really matter. The only obvious solutions to such conflict I can see are either reducing the presence of humans in the natural world, and thus allowing exploitation to continue as a viable strategy; or changing the attitude of our relationship to the rest of Nature to something less exploitative, less objectionable when applied to humans, and thus allowing our population to continue growing without artificial restraints.
What we cannot do, what we obviously don't stand for, is when we surround ourselves with other people and then proceed to rape them in the manner in which we rape areas of woodland or waterways; humans have an unfortunately high incidence of saying no to things.
Further, we would like to accomplish this without changing the way we deal with the world as a whole because, again, the exploitation of available resources whenever possible has been a very successful strategy for producing wonderful results, physical feats of human will unmatchable by any human body.
But as humans increase in number, we become much more of a factor in our own environments; the natural world as a whole is populated more by humans, and so in dealing with the natural world we are dealing with humans much more often than we have to when smaller population densities are the norm. Put another way, as more resources are tied up in sustaining human lives, human lives occupy a greater share of the pool of resources available to our species.
Where we encounter conflict is in attempting to manage our human-form resources the way we do resources in other forms. People don't like being treated the way people like treating things, and with enough people to deal with this starts to really, really matter. The only obvious solutions to such conflict I can see are either reducing the presence of humans in the natural world, and thus allowing exploitation to continue as a viable strategy; or changing the attitude of our relationship to the rest of Nature to something less exploitative, less objectionable when applied to humans, and thus allowing our population to continue growing without artificial restraints.
What we cannot do, what we obviously don't stand for, is when we surround ourselves with other people and then proceed to rape them in the manner in which we rape areas of woodland or waterways; humans have an unfortunately high incidence of saying no to things.
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