Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we are thrown into the world, with the attributes, atrocities and miracles that are attached to us, with all the original sin, glory and humanity that we must therefore bare. It is, to use an existentialist phrase I recently heard in a Jordan Peterson video, “Thrownness.” How we deal with all that entails is largely a factor of our culture. An effective culture brings children into adulthood by exploiting both the positive and negative factors of our thrownness, to forge and temper children into individuals, men and women capable, wise and humane. A weak culture exploits the negative factors, to mold kids into unfired bricks, susceptible to crumbling at the slightest jolt, servile and with an aching ego. How we deal with the realities of our thrownness, in large part, determines the future.
Some people consider the miracles of the past their own. This is a fallacy that materialists are prone to. Even imagining they themselves could recreate the technological world we live in, in paleolithic times, had they been born then. Electric lights seem so common that most people today cannot even imagine living without them. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the human race’s existence has been in darkness, by rushlight or candle light… not light bulb. Such thinking makes one arrogant, condescending and egoistic. This attitude is often reflected in the way some people address waiters and waitresses. Clearly using thrownness in a negative way. By identifying our species miracles as our own, and the evils as those of someone else, we become the present villains we detest in the past.
Some identify with the sins of the past as their own and by doing so become their own victims. To claim any race, religion or anyone, has a monopoly on past sin, is not only ignorant to the Nth degree, but stupid, in that it leads to stupid behavior. If you identify the West, as uniquely responsible for slavery, your ignorance is only surpassed by your gullibility. Especially given the fact the ethics of the West and Christianity is the reason slavery is outlawed in all Western nations today. Nevertheless, labeling a group as perpetrators, is a way to manipulate not only them, but society at large to hate them. Lenin couldn’t exterminate the Kulaks until he used their thrownness to get society to hate them first. Someone who uses the past to vilify the present is a swindler.
A wise, strong and lasting culture will educate, raise and nurture children, and use their thrownness as a way to strengthen them. The past of any random group we may or may not belong to, doesn’t define us, as the sins or inventions of other groups don’t. We have the “advantage of the present,” to judge the past, with an eye to our own advancement… philosophically, morally and scientifically. A foolish, weak and waning culture will focus on their past evils, attributing them to another group, rather than the human race, then arrogantly identify past accomplishments as uniquely their “group’s” own. Foolishly making themselves weak, arrogant and easily manipulated. Both cultural paradigms use our thrownness, to weaken us, or make us admantine individuals.
People in the future will have the same, “advantage of the present,” to judge us and our actions. Those that use our thrownness to weaken us do not seem to recognize this fact. They apparently think our present is the all and ever unchanging forever. Lacking the self awareness to realize, that the future will be as harsh a critic of us, as we are of the past. Our actions, good and bad, will change their thrownness for the better or worse. This will happen whether we like it or not. So why not embrace our role, and make the thrownness of the future better, by embracing the sins of the past, as not those of a group, but of our species. Then understand the heroism, inventions and advancements are ours as well. All of ours. Embrace our thrownness and we enhance the thrownness of future people.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
