Why do we think we can control human nature? Observe it? Yes. Predict it? Yes. Influence it? Yes. Control?
One of the "evils" of communism was the control by the state, compared to the "free" West, who entertains all and pursues many avenues. Now this freedom is the "evil" decried by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. In turn, those who want to repeal freedom are demonstrably wrong in the eyes of liberal-minded types. This won't change. This is always the way it's been. Is our capitalist system corrupt and evil? Yes, of course it is. What else did you expect?
Who can I blame for this? My parents generation? Yes. Their parents? Yes. Their parent's too? Yes, them too. Ancient wisdom says that the sins of the father endure through the third and fourth generation. Is this a cultural anomaly? Something we can circumvent, overcome, control? I scoff at those who claim it is. This is human nature.
I don't want this. I don't want to hear this truth. I want to make a change for the good of the world. I want this tyranny to stop. I want the hungry to be fed and the homeless to be sheltered. I want what I cannot have.
I don't mean to sound gloomy and depressed. I mean, what do I have to complain about? It's not my fault the world is the way it is, so be a good person and enjoy the blessings in my life: I have a secure job that I - sort of - enjoy, a loving family and all the luxuries of life that I could want. It's an illusion. We live a pretty exclusive existence in terms of the entire history of the human race.
I think it's safe to say that never before have so many enjoyed so much. And never before have so many suffered through so much. This is the balance of nature, the course of human will and action. Wealth and prosperity is accompanied by poverty and disaffected souls. I can accept human nature. I can accept the incredible wealth afforded to me (entirely without deserving it). I can accept that there is essentially nothing I can do to change a society of billions of people - I do what I can and my little goodness is hopefully a margin more than the evil I bring (may I be forgiven).
I don't have a plan to change the world for the better. Anyone offering such a plan is a liar: they can't know the outcome. I can only say this: the balance of nature is only preserved to a point, after which all is calamity and strife until order is restored. This is entirely out of our hands and out of our control. The only measure of restraint we can bring is to lessen the disharmony. This issue of climate change is the perfect example.
Are we responsible for climate change? Not really, the climate is designed to change, to be flexible - this is the beauty of nature. Certainly, though, in our hideous attempt to control nature we are tipping the scales at an unprecedented rate. What will happen? Order will be restored. Nature will reign in anything that displaces the balance it miraculously preserves.
The ancients and those who seek truth and meaning in religious scriptures will recognize this pattern. In the bible, the prophets spoke in cycles as the people Israel went from extreme reverence to extreme disregard for the will of God. I know how this all ends. Not well. This bothers me…quite a lot actually. I don't mean to sound fatalistic, but this is the way of things.
I return to climate change. I don't need to know whether or not global warming is a real phenomenon (it is) or just a figment of some egg-heads imagination. I don't need to know, because as an engineer I already know how utterly piss poor of a job we are doing in the present. We waste and disregard the physical laws of nature as if we can purchase our way out of the consequences. This is a lie. We have not reached the pinnacle of human subsistence on Nature. We can do more with less and achieve greater harmony with the natural mechanics of our world.
The prophets called the people Israel back into proper order, reverence and action with respect to God. How do we restore proper order in our lives? Listening to the truth is a start. But this notion is laughable. Truth, you say? Ha! Scoff. Disregard.
President Eisenhower knew how this ends, too. He saw the mass of economy and social dependence that was built into the "military industrial complex". Privatization and subcontracting wed the military and business worlds. We need to preserve our way of life, our order of business and our place in the global hierarchy because our wellbeing depends on it. So this ends when we can no longer "pay it forward", putting off consequences like a shuckster's sleight of hand in the ball-n-cup scheme. It works fine until a point when the scheme cannot be preserved, no longer holds up against the scrutiny of the forces that allow it to go on: in the case of the shuckster, it is the gulliability and timidness of his victim. In the case of our world, it is the flexibility of nature and the poverty of our victims.
So, I will lead my life, add what good I can, take away what wisdom I can discern, and pass it on to my children and comrades. I know how this ends. This life we lead is an illusion. The veil will be lifted one day, only just in time to see the tsunami of consequences - the sins from generations past - about to consume us.
But life demands peace and hope, or else everything is despair and calamity! When the comfort is gone, when our technology stops working, we will still need peace and hope. So, that begs the question, what do we put our hope in and how do we strive for peace? How do we restore proper order in our lives?
In the book The Shockwave Rider, the protagonist eventually reaches a moment of insanity because of the strain of life that technology has brought. It isn't that people are hard-up, lack for money or tools. It's that they are trying to overcome human nature through technology and the strain on the physical and mental health of people breaks before any kind of technological utopia is achieved.
One of the arguments in the novel is that the more we strive to build a better world through technological control (according to our whims), the more our notion of what ought to occur is displaced by the stark reality that we keep failing. So we must bear the weight of the physical and mental consequences of a life WAY out of balance, in order to try it all again. The tragic irony is that this simply accelerates the forces that will eventually bring things catastrophically back into order.
Again, how do we restore balance - proper order - in our lives without catastrophy?
I don't believe we can avoid catastrophe forever. But I do believe in a human spirit that yearns for harmony with nature and with each other. I do believe in a natural mechanical order to Nature and a spiritual yearning for meaning and self-worth. The issue, for me, is not how we can achieve proper order in our lives, but if it is POSSIBLE to fulfill our needs for self-worth and harmony with nature by our present means, or if we will only scratch out enough to get by and hope that the consequences in the latter generations will be solvable.
This is a lie.
The more we rely on technology, the more abstract and unnatural our lives become. This is at odds with our human nature. We cannot control our human nature. We cannot overwhelm our natural tendencies through technological control. With wisdom, we can learn how to find peace and hope in harmony with our nature. In the ensuing years people are going to be more crazy, more sick, more angry, bitter and malcontent. I know how this ends, not because I'm brilliant, but because I have seen it all before through the words of the prophets and through the lens of history.
People and civilizations teeter and fall, not despite their efforts, but because of them. They bring their own destruction through ignorance of human nature and the natural order of things. Even those who are keenly aware of human nature and seek to take advantage of others for their own gain (financial, social, psychological) will seem to have great wisdom (like Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power). They are destroyed because of their power and control over human nature - others see it and want to take it from them.
Ooooh, what a tangled web we weave when we plot to deceive. Right?
Well if our best efforts to control harmony are nothing more than child's play, maybe we need the wisdom to approach life differently. Maybe there is wisdom in religion. Maybe there is purpose to restraint and modesty. Maybe there is power in submission - not power over others, but power to find peace and hope in your life. To submit your will to the will of God is to seek to restore the natural order that our world and our bodies crave. What is the will of God? It's the wisdom to restore the natural order. What is the natural order? The outcome of the will of God.
Scoff! Circular logic. Irrational!
No. That too is a lie. This isn't an irrational undertaking. It is entirely rational within itself. The point of submission is simply to partake of:
-the experience of the revelation of the will of God
-which happens as we piece together the fragments of natural order
-which we discover through the peace and hope in our lives
-which guides us in seeking the revelation of the will of God.
To know, you must partake.
Is it true? When everything else is a lie, what are we left with? Sift through the deception, undermine the hypocrisy and what remains is pure gold - refined by fire (another common biblical theme).
I'm not advocating for the moral codes of any particular religion, since those constructs and laws are just as artificial as any other means we seek to control our human nature. I AM advocating for participating in the quest for the will of God: a quest that takes a lifetime and reaches culmination beyond our present understanding.
Perhaps this is true.
What I know with near certainty is that those who seek peace and hope will naturally be continuing the religious quest, ongoing since man first awoke from his slumber. We cannot exempt ourselves from this quest and expect anything other than dire consequences. The search for the will of God is the tempering process in our lives. It is that which identifies the disharmony and injustice in the world and seeks a righteous way.
I already know how this all ends. We cannot avoid the fate of man, to suffer and die. But where will we look for peace and hope in the midst of this incomprehensible gift that we call "life"? If we seek to control our lives and world we will only hasten our destruction. This is the will of God.
Scoff! Ridicule! Deride! You can't impose your values upon me!!!!
Make of God what you will. I already know how this ends. Seek the will of God to restore the order in your life that God intends, and find the peace and hope that accompanies it (and occasional fits of utter misery and discomfort with the tragedy in the world). If not for yourself, then for the sake of the billions who suffer that we might enjoy this extravagant illusion. If not for them, then for the sake of the subsequent generations who will bear the burden of our sins.
I know why we want to control our nature - because it is in our nature. In spite of their sins, our ancestors also pursued a better life with great vigor. I don't mean to undermine our culture as abhorrent, sinful and antithetical towards God. But we lack the cultural sense of divine order, to recognize that our lives are drastically beyond our control and teetering out of balance. We need to reevaluate our lives not just within the context of our personal aspirations, but as participants in the natural order of things - participants who have been blessed and cursed with the responsibility to seek the will of God.
The responsibility is not at our parent's behest, or from the admonitions of a priest or guru. The responsibility is the answer for our desire to control our nature. We cannot control, but we can understand why we lack control, where we are powerless and why our actions do not result in our desired outcome. If we account for our shortcomings and take responsibility for them, we are seeking the will of God.
My hope, if not my certain knowledge, is that peace results from fulfilling God's will. I don't have the plan and answer for everything - I'm not offering a grand control scheme. I only know that if truth, peace and hope have any value, they are expressed in the quest for God's will. The wisdom to carry this forth is something I think is self-evidently valuable. Two paths to peace: death or harmony. The natural order of the world ensures death in the end. I think a little bit more harmony in the meantime is something worth striving for.
Peace be with you.
Ezekiel 33
One of the "evils" of communism was the control by the state, compared to the "free" West, who entertains all and pursues many avenues. Now this freedom is the "evil" decried by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. In turn, those who want to repeal freedom are demonstrably wrong in the eyes of liberal-minded types. This won't change. This is always the way it's been. Is our capitalist system corrupt and evil? Yes, of course it is. What else did you expect?
Who can I blame for this? My parents generation? Yes. Their parents? Yes. Their parent's too? Yes, them too. Ancient wisdom says that the sins of the father endure through the third and fourth generation. Is this a cultural anomaly? Something we can circumvent, overcome, control? I scoff at those who claim it is. This is human nature.
I don't want this. I don't want to hear this truth. I want to make a change for the good of the world. I want this tyranny to stop. I want the hungry to be fed and the homeless to be sheltered. I want what I cannot have.
I don't mean to sound gloomy and depressed. I mean, what do I have to complain about? It's not my fault the world is the way it is, so be a good person and enjoy the blessings in my life: I have a secure job that I - sort of - enjoy, a loving family and all the luxuries of life that I could want. It's an illusion. We live a pretty exclusive existence in terms of the entire history of the human race.
I think it's safe to say that never before have so many enjoyed so much. And never before have so many suffered through so much. This is the balance of nature, the course of human will and action. Wealth and prosperity is accompanied by poverty and disaffected souls. I can accept human nature. I can accept the incredible wealth afforded to me (entirely without deserving it). I can accept that there is essentially nothing I can do to change a society of billions of people - I do what I can and my little goodness is hopefully a margin more than the evil I bring (may I be forgiven).
I don't have a plan to change the world for the better. Anyone offering such a plan is a liar: they can't know the outcome. I can only say this: the balance of nature is only preserved to a point, after which all is calamity and strife until order is restored. This is entirely out of our hands and out of our control. The only measure of restraint we can bring is to lessen the disharmony. This issue of climate change is the perfect example.
Are we responsible for climate change? Not really, the climate is designed to change, to be flexible - this is the beauty of nature. Certainly, though, in our hideous attempt to control nature we are tipping the scales at an unprecedented rate. What will happen? Order will be restored. Nature will reign in anything that displaces the balance it miraculously preserves.
The ancients and those who seek truth and meaning in religious scriptures will recognize this pattern. In the bible, the prophets spoke in cycles as the people Israel went from extreme reverence to extreme disregard for the will of God. I know how this all ends. Not well. This bothers me…quite a lot actually. I don't mean to sound fatalistic, but this is the way of things.
I return to climate change. I don't need to know whether or not global warming is a real phenomenon (it is) or just a figment of some egg-heads imagination. I don't need to know, because as an engineer I already know how utterly piss poor of a job we are doing in the present. We waste and disregard the physical laws of nature as if we can purchase our way out of the consequences. This is a lie. We have not reached the pinnacle of human subsistence on Nature. We can do more with less and achieve greater harmony with the natural mechanics of our world.
The prophets called the people Israel back into proper order, reverence and action with respect to God. How do we restore proper order in our lives? Listening to the truth is a start. But this notion is laughable. Truth, you say? Ha! Scoff. Disregard.
President Eisenhower knew how this ends, too. He saw the mass of economy and social dependence that was built into the "military industrial complex". Privatization and subcontracting wed the military and business worlds. We need to preserve our way of life, our order of business and our place in the global hierarchy because our wellbeing depends on it. So this ends when we can no longer "pay it forward", putting off consequences like a shuckster's sleight of hand in the ball-n-cup scheme. It works fine until a point when the scheme cannot be preserved, no longer holds up against the scrutiny of the forces that allow it to go on: in the case of the shuckster, it is the gulliability and timidness of his victim. In the case of our world, it is the flexibility of nature and the poverty of our victims.
So, I will lead my life, add what good I can, take away what wisdom I can discern, and pass it on to my children and comrades. I know how this ends. This life we lead is an illusion. The veil will be lifted one day, only just in time to see the tsunami of consequences - the sins from generations past - about to consume us.
But life demands peace and hope, or else everything is despair and calamity! When the comfort is gone, when our technology stops working, we will still need peace and hope. So, that begs the question, what do we put our hope in and how do we strive for peace? How do we restore proper order in our lives?
In the book The Shockwave Rider, the protagonist eventually reaches a moment of insanity because of the strain of life that technology has brought. It isn't that people are hard-up, lack for money or tools. It's that they are trying to overcome human nature through technology and the strain on the physical and mental health of people breaks before any kind of technological utopia is achieved.
One of the arguments in the novel is that the more we strive to build a better world through technological control (according to our whims), the more our notion of what ought to occur is displaced by the stark reality that we keep failing. So we must bear the weight of the physical and mental consequences of a life WAY out of balance, in order to try it all again. The tragic irony is that this simply accelerates the forces that will eventually bring things catastrophically back into order.
Again, how do we restore balance - proper order - in our lives without catastrophy?
I don't believe we can avoid catastrophe forever. But I do believe in a human spirit that yearns for harmony with nature and with each other. I do believe in a natural mechanical order to Nature and a spiritual yearning for meaning and self-worth. The issue, for me, is not how we can achieve proper order in our lives, but if it is POSSIBLE to fulfill our needs for self-worth and harmony with nature by our present means, or if we will only scratch out enough to get by and hope that the consequences in the latter generations will be solvable.
This is a lie.
The more we rely on technology, the more abstract and unnatural our lives become. This is at odds with our human nature. We cannot control our human nature. We cannot overwhelm our natural tendencies through technological control. With wisdom, we can learn how to find peace and hope in harmony with our nature. In the ensuing years people are going to be more crazy, more sick, more angry, bitter and malcontent. I know how this ends, not because I'm brilliant, but because I have seen it all before through the words of the prophets and through the lens of history.
People and civilizations teeter and fall, not despite their efforts, but because of them. They bring their own destruction through ignorance of human nature and the natural order of things. Even those who are keenly aware of human nature and seek to take advantage of others for their own gain (financial, social, psychological) will seem to have great wisdom (like Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power). They are destroyed because of their power and control over human nature - others see it and want to take it from them.
Ooooh, what a tangled web we weave when we plot to deceive. Right?
Well if our best efforts to control harmony are nothing more than child's play, maybe we need the wisdom to approach life differently. Maybe there is wisdom in religion. Maybe there is purpose to restraint and modesty. Maybe there is power in submission - not power over others, but power to find peace and hope in your life. To submit your will to the will of God is to seek to restore the natural order that our world and our bodies crave. What is the will of God? It's the wisdom to restore the natural order. What is the natural order? The outcome of the will of God.
Scoff! Circular logic. Irrational!
No. That too is a lie. This isn't an irrational undertaking. It is entirely rational within itself. The point of submission is simply to partake of:
-the experience of the revelation of the will of God
-which happens as we piece together the fragments of natural order
-which we discover through the peace and hope in our lives
-which guides us in seeking the revelation of the will of God.
To know, you must partake.
Is it true? When everything else is a lie, what are we left with? Sift through the deception, undermine the hypocrisy and what remains is pure gold - refined by fire (another common biblical theme).
I'm not advocating for the moral codes of any particular religion, since those constructs and laws are just as artificial as any other means we seek to control our human nature. I AM advocating for participating in the quest for the will of God: a quest that takes a lifetime and reaches culmination beyond our present understanding.
Perhaps this is true.
What I know with near certainty is that those who seek peace and hope will naturally be continuing the religious quest, ongoing since man first awoke from his slumber. We cannot exempt ourselves from this quest and expect anything other than dire consequences. The search for the will of God is the tempering process in our lives. It is that which identifies the disharmony and injustice in the world and seeks a righteous way.
I already know how this all ends. We cannot avoid the fate of man, to suffer and die. But where will we look for peace and hope in the midst of this incomprehensible gift that we call "life"? If we seek to control our lives and world we will only hasten our destruction. This is the will of God.
Scoff! Ridicule! Deride! You can't impose your values upon me!!!!
Make of God what you will. I already know how this ends. Seek the will of God to restore the order in your life that God intends, and find the peace and hope that accompanies it (and occasional fits of utter misery and discomfort with the tragedy in the world). If not for yourself, then for the sake of the billions who suffer that we might enjoy this extravagant illusion. If not for them, then for the sake of the subsequent generations who will bear the burden of our sins.
I know why we want to control our nature - because it is in our nature. In spite of their sins, our ancestors also pursued a better life with great vigor. I don't mean to undermine our culture as abhorrent, sinful and antithetical towards God. But we lack the cultural sense of divine order, to recognize that our lives are drastically beyond our control and teetering out of balance. We need to reevaluate our lives not just within the context of our personal aspirations, but as participants in the natural order of things - participants who have been blessed and cursed with the responsibility to seek the will of God.
The responsibility is not at our parent's behest, or from the admonitions of a priest or guru. The responsibility is the answer for our desire to control our nature. We cannot control, but we can understand why we lack control, where we are powerless and why our actions do not result in our desired outcome. If we account for our shortcomings and take responsibility for them, we are seeking the will of God.
My hope, if not my certain knowledge, is that peace results from fulfilling God's will. I don't have the plan and answer for everything - I'm not offering a grand control scheme. I only know that if truth, peace and hope have any value, they are expressed in the quest for God's will. The wisdom to carry this forth is something I think is self-evidently valuable. Two paths to peace: death or harmony. The natural order of the world ensures death in the end. I think a little bit more harmony in the meantime is something worth striving for.
Peace be with you.
Ezekiel 33
.. that sense of the apocalyptic .. and very Biblical in its own
way, prophetic-sounding almost
(ie as in Hinduism/India?)
