One More About Good And Evil

 

Do Something or Do Nothing?

 

The Button & The Brain

As I've said before, I believe there is a deterministic aspect of our existence and a real free will, that don't exclude each other, they are just diferente angles of seeing the same things. Our actions have causes, but all the web of causes and effects of the World could only be seen by a highest point of view which we will never posses, so from the human perspective, we do have free will.

Still, the deterministc angle raises some questions. Are there people who have more "luck" than the others? On the other hand, is anyone guilty for having "luck"?

I think we can fairly agree that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to bad people. If being good was always easy, it would be not really "being good". One things that I find important to note, however, is that when "good" things happen to bad people, I firmly believe it doesn't really give them inner peace, it doesn't give them real joy.

But, are the people who do bad things somehow innocent because of the deterministic angle? The free will angle shows that people have choice, and, even though it's tragic, if a person takes an evil path, that's what he becomes. That becomes what he has inside.

And as for the bad things that happen to good people, as far as I know, every religious tradition have among their most important commandments, that we all should try to do something for the people for whom life is not being the kindest.

The problem comes when a lot of people start to think about this as if the people who have some "luck" have an "original sin" to atone for.

This idea of "original sin" comes from a purely economic point of view. From seeing the goods of the World as limited, quantifiable, and thinking that what someone has, the other will be lacking.

Of course this thought encounters its "perfect" expression. in an ideology that sees all the processes of human life as having their origin in material economic diferences.

Money is quantifiable and easy to be considered s limited, so they can oversimplify everything and say that what abounds here will surely lack there. But it is not true because Civilization started and developed precisely because of the fact that the Earth does give more than what we put in it. So does the Universe.

And more importantly, Money is far from being the one and only big fator behind everything. And suffering is not a monopoly of the economic poor.

Imagine a little girl that sees a man pointing a gun to her father's head. There is pain, there is trauma...

Now of course, we must care for the poor, but the problem is the illusion that the solution is easily achieved. That ending the economic problems would be the most simple thing in the World.

It is easy to tell people to think: "why don't rich people just give everything right now"?

Okay, imagine if you have 300 millions and there is a million people in you country starving. You could give 300 bucks to each of them and solve their problem... for a week.

And if you pick 300 hundred people at random and give a million to each, what is the evidence that everybody's problem will be solved in long term?

If we made the - impossible in practice - total distribution, that is, we gather everybody's money then distribute it equally among the people, how should we keep producing everything we need?

I mean, the Earth gives more than what you put in it, but for that there are tools, techniques, strategies. The "distribution" would produce a chaos, and more poverty. Who would produce what? With what tools? What would happen with the money value and the inflation?

To be honest, I do think rich people, especially the super rich, could be doing, in a lot of stances, better for the World.

Take those big tech giants. I personally don't think they are doing the best they could. But if they are not caught in crime, then assaulting them is wrong, and they are caught in crime, only legal procedures are acceptable. That being said, I have a right to imagine, and say, that guys like them could do better.

I know nobody has a trillion in his pocket to dispose of it anyway he wants, they have to respond to stock holders all the time. But yes, I think they have a chance to do something much more inclusive and fruitful than they are doing. But why would they listen to someone like me, anyway?

By the way, my main contempt with the Internet giants, is that they do not behave in an open and clear way with their algorithms, with their rank numbers, and have the power to "ban" people and make it virtually impossible for a person who gets banned to defend herself and get back.

They are like restaurant owners who shouldn't have the right to refuse to serve someone. Or better yet, they are private builders and administrators of roads, that have a duty to make it safe, acessible and democratic.

But anyway, it's the idea - the false idea - that everybody that have swimming pools in their houses could just push a button and all the suffering in the World would be disappear, that is the biggest poisonous idea, a mental poison given to many people.

"Not building" a swimming pool does not magically solves the problem of someone else.

But the idea that everybody that is prosper could push a button - or snap their fingers - then all suffering would disappear - is extremely dehumanizing.

Because, if it is that simple, then why don't they just push that button? Why don't they just snap their fingers? The insane conclusion is that they don't care for nobody, not even for children, right?

And once you start seeing things this way, violence becomes justifiable. It would be okay to hurt these "monsters", right?

And once people start taking the path of violence, something happens within them. In their minds. I'm no pshychologist, psychiartrist or neurologist, but I am pretty sure there is damage. Or better yet, it shapes who they become. They become people for whom violence is the main things, destruction is not only normal but desirable. It becomes harder and harder to return to a path where peace and joy are achievable.

Take the problem of Israel and their neighbors. In the past, History shows us, in the end of Empires, two things: Jews expelled from antisemitic Arab countries and Nazi Europe, and Arabs being displaced from part of the Palestine. By seeing only the problem of the Palestinians, and not the pain of the Jews, not the fact that more than 99 percent of the Middle East still belongs to the Arabs, and that some Jews always lived in Palestine and returning for Israel is a deep cultural dream and became the only possibility of real Jewish Independence - not count on the goodwill of others all around the World - by seeing only one side, you make the Jews the great villains.

And you kill the chances of finding a real good solution. As if the Israeli were just witholding the happiness of the Palestinians in their hands for cruelty, and not just defending themselves in a violent region.

You sponsor an ideology where killing is acceptable, violence is the goal, destruction serves a good purpose. Bomb killings, stabings in the street, all creating an absurd system of reward in their minds, that culminated in a diabolical attack where more than a thousand - by no means a small number - people were mudered at random, raped and kidnapped, which started this war. And fed an insane form of thought in the minds of many Arabs, that only takes them further from the possibilities of inner peace.

There is an old little story, that I quote here as illustration, that, when a Nazi officer went to kill an old Jew, the Jew turned to heavens and thanked God. "What are you thanking him for?" The Jew answered, "because he didn't make me like you".

As students and others go to the street and chant "Gloablize the Intifada", I would say that, well, you seem comfortable in wishing evil to the Jews, we are realizing that, but do you see what you are wishing upon the Muslin Arabs?

The worst. The worst for their minds, the worst for their lives.

As is anyone who says things like "let the poor take arms and kill the rich".

Killing opportunities of peace will never bring happinness.

The T word... could be you

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Anniversary

 Wow, it's been 3 years since I published this:

I do Believe It's Still There (Jul 9, 2023)

Remember: EXAPTATION IS COINCIDENCE!

(thanx for the unwavering support)

What Will Grow?

 

I feel a lot of people don't take the intentions of the Iranian regime so seriously. The Iranian leaders have said openly, many times, that Israel should simply not exist, and the fact that they finance Terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is not a secret.

But still, people think that the region is just "complex" and what needs to be done is to give incentives to those governments to go back to "reason", to the "normal", which means, for us, to care mostly about the Economy.

Maybe people think that all this bloody rethoric is a political trend, a bad choice of method to mantain power. That what those people want, obviously, is to be influent, so they use this "trend". But I think it goes deeper than that.

Why do some leaders go in the direction of inciting violence, in first place? Some theorists may have an explanation that goes like this: "give people a 'common enemy', and you gain popularity".

It is not a wrong vision in itself, having a "common enemy" is indeed a strategy of power. But these things are not "created" out of nothing, neither do they pass so easily, with just a simple adjustment of direction.

Hatred as a form of power is something that has deeper roots than people use to think.

There has always been people who have a tendency to hate the different and place all the blame in the other for everything.

The Iranian regime grew from the part of the Iranian population that had that tendency, which is old in the Arab World. Hatred for the Jew is not a recent political invention.

There are so many people in Iran - as in the Arab Muslin World - that want, not to destroy someone, but to seek good things for themselves, but the ones that rose to power in Iran - and in some other parts - come from the background of hatred.

And they formed their whole structure of power around it.

Who are the people that a murderous regime have as leaders, and who are the people around the leaders?

Who are the men that have been chosen to lead and to be part of the Terrorist groups? The ones that plan and execute mass murders, mass rapes?

Their intentions are clear and this is the direction they are going to. In extremists ideological regimes, fidelity to the "cause" is the main thing that anyone must show for their leaders, their peers and their subordinates.

So we don't know how far it can go.

This kind of problem is not solved with simple "incentives" to be "normal".

They've crossed so many lines, and the danger for the good people - including the good muslins - is a danger of death, because those cults don't really care about life. They put a "cause" so much above life that life loses its value.

We can't let investment in violence, domination, be something that pays back. We can't make everything so relative that other countries feel safe to be best friends with bloody and aggressive dictatorships.

The recentes facts show that all this have left the realm of speech and turned into action quite a while ago. With horrible consequences for people.

Are we passing a clear message that threatening and targeting a country like Israel, and to finance terrorist groups against them is unnacceptable?

Or are we letting that part of humanity - I don't have the demographics - grow?

Humanities Cut In Half

Recently, a civil group in Israel released the report called "Silenced No More", which shows, with undeniable evidence that includes tons of vídeos of the deeds, how sexual abuse was a modus operandi, not an exception, in October 7th and the subsequente captivity of Israeli civillians. And before that, there was already an immense documentation of atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and their followers. It shows cruelty with no mercy, it shows people having pleasure and laughing while inflicting pain and horror.

To me, something else that deserves attention, is the ways in which a lot of people, from or alligned with the mainstream academic world, don't want to allow us to draw conclusions from what we see.

I think that the way people act does say something. "Punitive rape", for instance, is an abomination that only makes sense to extremely perverted minds. The hatred for women showed in those situations, the way that they commited cruelty against infants, show they have no consideration for anybody.

And yes, all that shows that the intention they have is centered on the destruction of the other, it shows, very clearly, that is has nothing to do with creating a land where "everybody can come and go freely", where "people have all their rights respected", where "palestinians and Israelis can live side by side as equals".

It has nothing to do with equality, with civil rights. It's about hatred, destruction. But some people say we can't conclude that.

The intellectual movement, the world vision that seems to want to dissociate "method" from "intention", and "intention" from the essence of a movement, is nowadays the mainstream in the academic world and, unfortunately, it influences the press, the political world, and the entertainment world.

It focuses on "what is unfair in societies", but instead of recognizing advances when they happen and legitimate attempts to make things better, it pays attention almost solely on what is out there that they consider "not really fair".

And by not really recognizing the good things, like not recognizing that Israel, for instance, has accepted two states in the beginning, and made attempts for peace many times since, and do have muslins integrated in their Society, some people paint a world that is totally negative.

They create a vision of an "unbearable world", and consider the problems they see as the sole cause and the whole explanation of whatever conflict happens, and whatever happens in the conflict.

By not recognizing anything good about societies, they exempt the side they consider "oppressed" of any responsibiliy in building solutions, in creating concrete instruments for making a better World. They consider these "oppressed people" and their mentalities as mere inevitable consequences of problems.

But the human mentality is made not purely of seeing problems and reacting to them, with no limits. It's also about knowing what you want.

And every culture in the World, and Islam surely included, offer to people different ways of reacting to things than losing all the moral boundaries.

The wisdom that becoming a cruel perpetrator is even worst than suffering injustice, is one of the pillars that separates human civilization from chaos.

To see the human mentality as a whole, we must admit that the way in which people act shows us the World they are trying to build.

The event that started the current War, the horrible massacre of October 7th, displays a level of cruelty that shows a movement aimed to the destruction and humiliation of others, and its total disconnection from any possibility of a good outcome shows that they were using whatever claims of injustice that want others to believe, as excuses to the exercise of pure hatred.

The central idea that guides the modern mainstream academical thought about societies is an idea that is not exactly wrong at the very principle. It's the idea that problems create tensions that push us to seek a better balance.

But there needs to be a framework, moral boundaries, for the resolution of any tension. Otherwise you just fall into unlimited violence and cruel dictatorships that are worst than any problem you initially detected.

These frameworks exist in every culture, and should not be thrown away.

In fact, for historical reasons, the Western World, which is seen by the mainstream academical world as some kind of devil, is where this process of tension and resolution within frameworks happened more continuosly.

The prosper countries in the West like the United States, have wrong deeds on their History, of course, but also dealt with immigration and the tensions it causes in a scale that no country in the East ever had to deal with, and even with all imperfections, and problems, bridges have been built, opportunities have been given to people. It's not all negative. America is a fruit of "dialectic processes" like no other.

And in the case of the Middle East, it is easy for some people, to disconsider all that Israel have tried for peace, and see only the problems, then you justify or relativize the long string of terrorist attacks that happened all along Israel's history, and then you see any security measure that Israel had to take as "oppressive", and exempt the other side of the obligation to show any engagement in creating conditions for peace.

But then you are cutting the human being in half. You keep the problems, but throw away his vision of a good future, his vision of peace. The framework, the boundaries within which problems must be solved.

History shows us that all cultures have their boundaries and the reactions of different peoples under oppression show us that these basic principles don't simply disappear when there are problems. What does make people throw away basic values is the seduction of movements that promise glory, admiration, power, as rewards for violence.

And by seeing the human being as whole, we can see a Society in Israel, dealing with the problems, not with perfection, but within Democracy, and with legitimate offers of peace through History. And in the other side, the seduction of a hatred movement that cares not for its own people.

With their way of portraying the human being as blindly propeled by problems and not as also a creator of solutions, and by making the details of the Terrorist actions irrelevant, the mainstream academic people are trying to make us blind to the fact that, in order to create a World where nobody dies of War - a World we desire but has never existed yet - we need to consider the end of hatred movements the priority. And they want to make us blind to the fact that it would be insane for a country that wants its people to feel minimally safe from absolute horror, to not get into a War that the enemy already started in the most horrible way.

The actions of people obviously have something to say about the direction which some forces are trying to lead the World to. And that what Israel wants - the end of the Terrorism backed by Iran - is absolutely vital, and, unfortunely, necessary to fight for. It is unfair to ask for a people not to fight against something that is trying to destroy them.

These mainstream academic people want us to see people's actions and then go ask them, the mainstream academic people, what is really going on. Then they will tell us the problems that "justify" those deeds. But by seeing people's actions, we can already have a vision of what is going on. By seeing people's actions, we can infer their goals, and by seeing their goals, we can have a good idea of their real motives.