“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
- English proverb
Hell means something different according to the world you live in. There are, for instance, many Christians who live in worlds where hell is a place, somewhere you will go after you die if you have lived wickedly. There are other worlds, however, where the idea of going anywhere after death is absurd and those who entertain such fancies are deemed a lesser kind of person. It is fascinating, although not at all surprising, that those who live in these diametrically opposed worlds often share in common a disdain for their mirror image. One camp detests those who have sinned and are thus ‘going to hell’, while the other camp despises those who believe that hell is a place.
For some reason, and I think it’s clear which one, people have argued enormously about which of these worlds is ‘more real’ than the others. But the worlds we live in are not real, they are imagined. We imagine worlds that make sense of our perceptions. Whether or not there is a place that the name ‘hell’ refers to distracts us from what ought to matter. For if you are a Christian, obsessing about why other people are going to hell is to fail in no uncertain terms to live as a good Christian. Yet equivalently, for non-Christians to condemn those who do not share their beliefs is to make exactly the same kind of moral error, namely, to vilify those who live in different worlds.
Truth, I claim, is capable of traversing our worlds, and as such the metaphorical meaning of this particular proverb about the ‘road to hell’ is the one that can mount the strongest claim to truth. Frankly, the warning embedded in this folk wisdom in no way depends upon whether hell is the name of a place or not. Even if you happen to live in a world where hell does name a place, ‘the road to hell’ is evidently a metaphor, since no-one I have yet met thinks there is a way to literally drive there.
The wisdom of this saying lies in the fact that very few people are willing to think of themselves as wicked. Even dangerous sociopaths valorise their tawdry actions as somehow special and unique. For most of us, the choices we make will be defended by justifications that allow us to maintain a positive image of ourselves. Indeed, the widespread acceptance of economics serves as a philosophy that permits exactly this kind of psychological self-defence. It defends the possession of immense and unjust wealth, explains the poverty of others as a consequence of their own inadequacies, and allows decisions that are based entirely around making more money to appear reasonable. That the world of economics seems less bizarre than the worlds of Christians would be utterly baffling if you did not appreciate the inherent absurdity of our species.
This need to explain ourselves as the ‘good guys’, the sleight-of-mind induced to defend this story at all costs, wreaks terrible havoc upon those we share our planet with. It fools us into inflicting suffering while we cloak ourselves in the warm glow of the good intentions we imagine. Chinese bureaucrats interring the Uyghur for ‘re-education’. Soldiers excusing torture as ‘enhanced interrogation’. Social media censors enforcing government dogma as ‘moderation’. Reporters declining to interview those who ‘spread misinformation’ while in utter ignorance of the complexity of the matter at hand.
I hold no ill will to those who live in worlds where hell is a place, because for me the truth of hell, the truth that can cross between our worlds, is indeed that sin leads straight to hell. Sin, after all, is another word for human suffering, and we all bring this about, through what we ourselves do, or through our failure to defend others from harm. Whether or not there is some other place that deserves the name hell matters far less to me than the fact that there are people living in hells that are here on our planet. Truly, many a path into these infernal worlds was gleefully paved by those who fooled themselves into believing all that mattered was that the wretched wickedness they were inflicting was forged from good intentions.
Yep! right on! But comments – of course.
𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑. 𝑊𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠.
Yes! These two assertions are a couple of the girders that hold up my world. [1][2] Although I know that it is logically possible to do so, I cannot for the life of me imagine taking them down.
I’d like to quibble with “imagined.” Off and on I image a society of extra-terrestrials that live in a small subterranean city on the far side of the moon. I call them “the observers.” They have been observing and studying life on Earth for 500,000 years. Their life space is 500 Earth years.
The construction of this imaginary world is a joint effort between my consciousness and my unconsciousness. I submit that my brain’s construction of my everyday reality is quite a different process. For one, this process occurs entirely in my unconsciousness. My conscious mind has very little, if any, control over this construction. For another, although this process takes place, without exception, in the unconsciousness of every human being, it results in the creation of a simulation of everyday reality that is very nearly identical for every human being. The usual name for this process is “perception.” It is quite different than “imagination.”
𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥𝘴
For me, this is one of the acids that is presently eating away at our civilization. I submit that this “habit of thought” need not be. In general, humans relish nature’s differences. Although most individuals will only delight in a few, there are something like 30,000 species of butterflies on our planet. [3] Furthermore, it is only because the universe is so constructed that no two humans are exactly alike, even at birth, that we are even here. [4][5]
𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴
Leaving aside considerations of exactly what this phrase means, we can ask: “Why is this?” Isaac Asimov posited several laws that circumscribed all the actions of his robots. Although human beings are orders of magnitude more complex than any robot we can currently construct, I maintain that fundamentally humans are biological machines that are similarly constrained by laws. One of these laws is the law of self-preservation. This law is not absolute, nor does it operate in isolation from other laws. In many situations an amalgamation of the application of several laws defines the action.
𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘴
MW dictionary – economics:
a: a social science concerned chiefly with … goods and services
b: economic theory, principles, practice
For me, “capitalistic economics would be more precise.
𝘶𝘯𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩
In the world of capitalistic economics is there such a thing as “unjust wealth”?
For me, “vastly unequal” would avoid getting into any consideration of the concept of justice.
𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘴
MW dictionary – absurd:
1a: ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, incongruous, extremely silly or ridiculous
We are the result of evolution on our planet. How can that be absurd? Except that of all the life forms on this planet we alone have the ability to annihilate ourselves by our own hands, an absurd finale to a process that took 3 billion years to produce a life form with significant self-awareness.
𝘚𝘪𝘯 … 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨
MW dictionary – sin -- various definitions, but:
1b: an action that is or is felt to be highly reprehensible.
Fix (?):
Sin is any action that directly results in human suffering.
𝘸𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘤 𝘶𝘱𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩... (through to the end of this post)
I agree, but I don’t think this is an entirely hopeless situation. Even if we assume that the laws governing the behavior of an individual are in place at birth, it is clear, at least from an operational perspective, that brains are continually modified by experience, especially any experience that occurs before maturity at 20.
Roughly forty thousand yeas ago humans realized that they could multiply muscle power by using a lever, and thereby expedite changes in physical reality. Making changes in social reality is more problematic, but not impossible.
Question:
Is it possible to have retrained, controlled capitalism in a pantopia? [6][7] I believe so. But the present era of unrestrained capitalism appears to be disastrously unstable. Worse, at present there does not appear to be any way of getting it under control before it drives us off a cliff.
Notes:
[1] Assertion 1: Every human being is aware only of what is manifested in their own consciousness. Assertion 2: Every human being is so constructed that they must make sense of [2] the signals that are unceasingly generated by their sense organs.
[2] At the moment, I’m leaving “make sense of” unexplained.
[3] ChatGPT (03/09/23): How many species of butterflies are there?
[4] ChatGPT (03/09/23): Are identical twins exactly alike at birth?
[5] If the process by which a life-form reproduced resulted in the production of an exact copy, evolution could not happen.
[6] Strictly speaking an economy in which the means of production are owned by the state is not capitalism. In practice however, the state is controlled by oligarchs and the distribution of wealth and power is even more skewed than in democratic capitalism.
[7] protopia: an imperfect and fractious, but globally peaceful and just, world society. See www.amazon.com/s?k=pantopia&i=stripbooks&crid=FUPUIU2P520B&sprefix=pantopia%2Cstripbooks%2C129&ref=nb_sb_noss.