Dear Friends,
It seems to me that there is never a dearth of people who think they know how others should live. They themselves are reticent to have any other person have any input into how they should live even to the point of outlawing thought and feelings. I like to call them protyranists.
While no protyranist believes they themselves will come under the tyrants purview he or she loves to level moral outrage at despicable acts of greed, things that are unconscionable, and the like. Making moral judgments while denying the other side the right to make moral judgments.
But if making a moral judgment is wrong then making a moral judgment is wrong. It cannot be that making a moral judgment about a thing that is not only self evident but is empirical truth, is wrong, while making a politically based ‘moral’ judgment, with class warfare as the premise, is acceptable. It simply cannot be logically. Yet, it is unquestioned, when it is done.
We all live in a cave, according to Francis Bacon, and we see the world from our unique point of view. From our perspective the way another lives may be totally unacceptable to us but we tolerate the other’s right to live as they do. We allow them the right to destroy themselves, or to succeed, it is their life, not ours to play with.
Like most all the situation comedies you and I have ever watched. Lucy interferes with Ethel’s life, with the most loving intentions, and the whole thing goes awry… Comedy is always based on some point of irony in human nature. The irony is that no matter how well our intentions, when we interfere in the lives of others, we have great potential to do great harm.
The only time we have the duty to interfere is when someone is damaging the human rights of another. This is widely recognized as the definition of when the State has the right to interfere with the rights of the individual.
For example; If an individual is offended at their neighbor planting pansies, the offended neighbor has no right to interfere with the neighbor with poor taste’s flowers, but if a neighbor sees their neighbor being strangled, they have a duty to interfere with the person’s rights, who is strangling their neighbor. The State is exactly the same.
The difference is that the State has a monopoly on violence. Willingly given from the people as a means to stem the violence of the brutish among us. We, as civilized citizens of a nation, give up our right to retribution, to the State, to be carried out in a manner that will have the most settled and ordered, (for society and the individual’s), outcome possible.
Another of Francis Bacon’s idols is the idol of the theater. Protyranists love to us this against the people they seek to tyrannize. They construct some elaborate scheme that seems true even when you think about it. The protyranist gets the scientific community to gather around the idea by making it very lucrative to do so. Then systematically evict anyone with a confounding question. Eventually people in the scientific community will get the hint and will go along.
People follow what they believe the scientists believe. We all give the scientist the benefit of the doubt in part because of the scientific ethos. To doubt all theories until proven. But even this has led science astray more often than not. The line of advancement in our understanding of science, or the mind of God, has not been linear, it has been more of a fractal. So, we have been led astray by people who we trusted, and who trusted themselves.
When this scheme, the protyranist has cooked up, comes to fruition, it will require drastic shifts of power to the State from the individual. The protyranist has his dreams fulfilled as he gains power over the foolish masses. He can then improve their lives, just like Lucy did Ethel…
